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IN AND UNDER MEXICO 





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IN AND UNDER 
MEXICO 


BYe a 
RALPH McA. INGERSOLL 


ILLUSTRATED WITH 
PHOTOGRAPHS 





THE CENTURY CO. 
New York & London 


Copyright, 1924, by 
Tue Century Co. 


Printed in U. S. A. 





cess ee A ne a ~ re ef eeu 
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TO LUCIE 
Is 
DEDICATED 


what is left of this book 
after her happy pencil 
finished with it 


565854 





ACKNOWLEDGMENT 


Acknowledgment is hereby made of the courtesy of the 
publishers of ‘‘Our World Magazine’’ for permission to 
use material from an article by the author, ‘‘A Miner 
in Mexico,’’ published by them in 1923. 





CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 
I Heapin’ Soute 


II PuystcaL Impressions or Ey Monte . 
Ill My Jos anp THE First Day 
IV I Taxer Over Division ONE 
V “Ew La Mirna” 
VI CoNcERNING THE Mexican Town . 
- VII Tue American COLONY ON THE HILL 
| Vill Nieur Lire 
- IX Tue Bouw-Rine . 
X <A SunpAy’s ADVENTURING . 


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111 
134 
149 
166. 
183 
204 
222 





ILLUSTRATIONS 
Mmsonte, de Cobre . . . . . . . «. « ~~ Frontismece 


FACING PAGE 
A sunny morning in the Mexican town ..... . 4 


The annual celebration around the monument to the town’s 
hero, Jesus, the locomotive engineer . .. . . . . 13 


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OLE eg AIRE SIO Iara Barr i OE a rR er Se PU Es 9 


The glorious vista sacrificed each poy for the eternal dark- 
ES GE gh a arc Ug O Caper ics ahi: 62, 


Cross section sketch of acopper mine. . ..... 641 
The engineering crew of Division One ..... . 64 
EMT eseOCH GOWN, Ss ee Sion ale eee ee 
The battle-scarred mountain-side . . . da eta? Oe 
Coming up Fifth Avenue to Forty-second Street Fi eae eG 
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El Dormitorio: The poets s quarters ae type Ameri- 
can company houses . . seis . 144 


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IN AND UNDER MEXICO 





IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


CHAPTER I 
HEADIN’ SOUTH 


EATED on top of my vast pile of luggage, in 

the rear part of a very excitable little Ford 
truck, at nine o’clock of a hot New Year’s morning, 
I rolled out of the U. S. A. and through the con- 
erete portals that told me I was entering Mexico. 
I rolled out from under the pall of sulphur-laden 
smoke that hangs eternal over the smelter town on 
the border, and into the scattered handful of adobe 
shops and frame cabarets which is advertised by 
its own chamber of commerce as the ‘‘Gateway to 
the Treasureland of Mexico.”’ 

For a year and a half I had been working under- 
ground, in mines on the American side of the border, 
getting the ‘‘experience and psychology of the la- 
borer’’ that seems to be the supreme test of young 
mining engineers. And then one day, when I came 
blinking up out of the darkness, I found waiting for 
me, from the company I was working for, a trans- 


fer to one of its copper-mines in Mexico. 
3 


4 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


‘“What kind of a job is it?’’ I asked my superin- 
tendent. 

‘‘Lord knows,’’ was his answer; ‘‘it ’s probably 
a dozen jobs, down there!’’ 

So I thought to myself of a ‘‘white-collar’’ po- 
sition, ‘‘on top,’’ and of the famous ‘‘senoritas,’’ 
and I packed up my troubles and set forth. 

I finished out the old year in the border town, 
and thoroughly enjoyed the extra day, or night, I 
spent there. Copper, which is the life-blood of the 
community, was deader then than the glory that 
was Egypt, and everybody seemed to be very busy 
drowning the memory of it. There is a curious — 
unwritten law at this point that alcohol is man’s 
inherent right but boot-legging is an abomination. 
1 noticed that every car was stopped and searched 
as it came to the American side of the line, and I 
saw one man, who had six cases of champagne in 
the back seat, arrested; but time and again I 
watched drivers with bulging pockets, and even sus- 
picious-looking bundles in their laps, and saw, the 
officials smile and motion them to drive on. No 
wholesale trading was allowed, but smuggling for 
personal consumption was another matter. The rule 
was the most sensible I have run into anywhere 
along our borders. 

But this is not getting on with my story. On that 
New Year’s morning, beyond a certain reminiscent 


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HEADIN’ SOUTH 5 


effect of the previous evening, I was thinking very 
little of boot-leggers and a great deal of the ex- 
oticism of the atmosphere that surrounded me the 
minute my carriage of state drew up over the border. 
I don’t know of a single arbitrary line that one can 
cross in this world, with the possible exception of 
the imaginary one between Brooklyn and New York, 
that gives a greater feeling of contrast than the 
border between the two North American republics. 

Busy, hustling, paved streets, ‘‘Broadway’’ illu- 
mination, trolley cars and jitneys gave place to 
dusty, wide avenues, quite asleep and lined with 
little open shops decorated in front with long gar- 
lands of strange-colored dried eatables. (I sup- 
pose they were eatable, although just then I should 
have hated to experiment!) Within the shops were 
sleek, oily Chinamen, the tradesmen; and without, 
lounging about and looking for all the world as if 
they had been transferred from a moving-picture 
“‘set,’’ the Mexicans. The men wore bright colors 
and appeared listless; the women, in black, were nos- 
ing around and handling the wares displayed. The 
whole scene was thrown into slow motion, too. It 
seemed impossible that anything could be done in 
a hurry, until I got to the custom-house in the 
diminutive railroad station and one of the officials 
began to talk to me. In his speech there didn’t 
seem to be any conservation of energy! 


6 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


To begin with, I did n’t know a word of Spanish; 
I was coming to the country to learn it. So I planked 
my luggage down, seated myself upon it, and folded 
my arms. I’m quite sure that the inspector, who 
was a big brigand with a ten-quart hat, a ferocious 
mustache, and two six-shooters, told me his life 
story at least ten times. The experience was a sad 
beginning to an adventure, and I should be sitting 
there still had it not been for the timely arrival 
of aid; for it turned out that no one in the station, 
five hundred yards from the United States, spoke a 
word of English. The aid came in the form of a 
little Texan who proved to be the clerk of the com- 
pany hotel in Cobre, the camp I was bound for. 
He proceeded to shake everybody’s hand and pass 
out a few cigars, and in five minutes, without the 
opening of a bag, the bandit had, with indelible-chalk 
scribbling, ruined my perfectly good suit-case, and 
we had passed the customs. 

The railroad was a company line running from 
the smelter on the border to the mill town of Cobre, 
a little over a hundred miles south. From my new 
companion I learned that the journey to Cobre con- 
sumed almost a day, and that the mine I was bound 
for, El Monte de Cobre, was in the mountains be- 
yond. The train got under way only an hour late. 
Immediately, great excitement prevailed. I had just 
settled back to enjoy life, when the door at the far 


HEADIN’ SOUTH 7 


end of our car burst open and three men strode in. 
Each wore a huge sombrero, at least two feet wide, 
a bright striped shirt under an open vest, and, slung 
around his waist, crossed cartridge-belts and two of 
the largest guns I have ever seen carried as ‘‘small 
arms.’’ The men wore no masks, but I was sure 
we were in for a hold-up, and I rather looked for- 
ward to the novelty of it. The crowd in the front 
end of the car stood up, and a terrific argument 
began. J ducked my head in the most approved 
manner; after all, I had n’t been going to Wild-West 
cinemas for nothing. But the little hotel clerk at 
my side only laughed and drawled at me, ‘‘Immi- 
gration officers; it’s all right!’’ 

I was horribly disappointed, but that really was 
all they were. He told me the officials always waited 
for the train to be on its way, because then they 
never had to bar any one, but could argue matters 
out for the rest of the run and pick up what little 
persuasion might come their way. I learned that 
about half the passengers on that train were offi- 
cials, anyway. The Mexicans have a passion for 
holding office. Every official has at least four sub- 
ordinates, the object of the game being to see who 
can carry the most armament. At this, Mexicans 
are remarkably proficient. 

When the worst of the excitement was over, I got 
up and wandered through the train. We were at 


8 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


the rear of a long string of empty ‘‘concentrate’’ 
ears going back to the mill, to be loaded. There 
were two passenger-coaches—our own luxurious 
General-Grant-period day-coach, first class, and a 
box-car with wooden benches across it, that did duty 
for second class. This latter was crowded to ¢a- 
pacity with heavily swathed individuals. It must 
have been nearly ninety degrees in that car, and 
most of the children (of whom there were plenty) 
were naked, but the women kept their black cotton 
shawls over their heads and around their necks, 
and the men were huddled under their blanket-like 
serapes. These passengers were mostly of the peon 
class, I supposed, although why there should be such 
a migration I could not surmise. In the first-class 
ear there were a party of American hunters,— 
‘Cafter mountain lion,’? my companion told me,—an 
American miner returning to camp after a holiday 
and showing the effects of New Year’s eve, and 
a handful of better-class Mexicans, very much ‘‘up 
stage’’ about the interference of the officials and 
the wanderings of the second-class passengers. 

The first half of the journey was across a con- 
tinuation of the desert, through the middle of which 
runs the international line. Great, flat, dusty, and 
deserted. The train rattled and clanked along an 
endless straight track at twenty miles an hour, and 
one by one the passengers and the train crew fell 


HEADIN’ SOUTH 9 


asleep. It was a delightfully care-free ride: no 
pompous American brakeman to tell me to take my 
feet down from the seat in front of me; no lurching 
forward to a suffocating smoking-car to have a 
cigarette. I smoked when I pleased, and every one 
seemed to expectorate as the spirit moved. 

About noon we drew into a ranching village of 
thatched houses on adobe foundations, with an im- 
posing jail and four cantimas—Mexican for saloons. 
We rushed out for a bottle of cold beer, famous 
““cerveza helada,’’ and came back to wait in the 
train an hour or more while the engineer took 
his noonday nap. A host of small girls had boarded 
the train with little baskets of food. I met the re- 
nowned hot tamale in its native haunts, wrapped 
in greasy corn-husks, and discovered little pies of 
blackish dough folded over a center of some sort 
of cactus candy. If there were no cactus, I think 
Mexico would go out of business; for all the candy 
and nine tenths of the alcoholic beverages of the 
country are made from this obliging plant. 

As we finally pulled out of the oasis, the examples 
around me became too much to bear and I too fell 
asleep. When I awoke, it took me a minute to real- 
ize I was still on the same train; for the desert was 
no longer about us and we were squirming up a 
tortuous, steep-sided valley, surrounded by the 
pleasantest of green trees. The train had plunged 


10 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


into fairyland, winding in and out through deep 
cafions, following a tiny trickling stream. It was 
cool, and the engineer was breaking all world’s rec- 
ords at thirty miles an hour and threatening to break 
our necks as well. I was enchanted; we seemed a 
million miles away from desolate Arizona. All after- 
noon every turn brought a new vista, and at last, 
—across a high ridge and around a bend—suddenly 
I saw our goal spread out below us: Cobre de 
Jesus, lying in the bottom of a cup-like valley which 
brought suddenly into my mind old conceptions of 
the valley of the Doones, so steep were the moun- 
tains which hemmed it in. 

As we wound down, the little Texan, who had 
also awakened, began to tell me more of the town. 
It was built around the great concentrator that 
handles the copper ore from the mine, and boasted 
a colony of perhaps fifty Americans, a company ho- 
tel, and a monument. 

This monument, he told me, was the reason for 
the ‘‘Jesus’’ in the name of the town. Its story is 
remarkable. The mine uses enormous quantities of 
explosives, which come from the States in special 
trains. Jesus was the name of the engineer of one 
of these trains. On November 7, 1908, the regular 
monthly shipment came in as usual and was trans- 
ferred to the mine railroad, two cars of it being 
left in the yards, awaiting a clear track up the hill. 


HEADIN’ SOUTH 11 


The regular crew was in the locomotive cab, wait- 
ing for orders, in another part of the yard. The 
day was a scorching-hot one, and the sun’s rays 
beat down unmercifully. No one knows whether 
it was due to the heat of the sun or to a stray spark 
from the engine, but at about two o’clock in the 
afternoon the town was startled by the sudden blast 
of a locomotive whistle and the screech of the fire 
siren: the two cars loaded with high explosive were 
afire! Jesus, in his locomotive, had seen the fire and 
signaled. He saw, too, that within a few minutes 
the fire would reach the nitroglycerine, and a second 
later there would be no Cobre, no mill, no people 
—only a tangled mass of wrecked structures, a great 
hole in the ground where the train had been, and the 
silence that follows terrible disasters. 

He gave one order: ‘‘Every one out of the cab!”’ 
The men flew. Then, knowing exactly what he was 
doing, he backed across the yard and with his own 
hands coupled his engine to the burning cars. Then 
he climbed calmly back into the cab, opened the 
throttle, and pulled that train, afire, out of the 
yards, half a mile up the track, and was still going 
when the explosion came! ‘The concussion broke 
every window in town and killed twelve men besides 
himself. It blinded his own sister. But it saved 
about five thousand men, women, and children, and 
left his name a synonym for unparalleled bravery. 


12 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


The town erected the monument, which stands in 
the center of the patio and is one of the first things 
to be seen by any one walking up from the station. 
The anniversary of the man’s death is a big holiday ; 
on that day there are wreaths on the stone; many 
speeches are made, and there is much weeping on 
all sides. Hvery one remembers the heroic engineer. 
His picture hangs in the company guest-house—a 
full-length portrait of him in overalls. He looks the 
type of man who would do as he did: a lean brown 
face, with resolution in its square chin and a reck- 
less daring in the keen black eyes. 

While I was still enthralled by the story of hero- 
ism, the train uttered a prolonged shriek of delight 
and drew up at its destination. A hundred dirty lit- 
tle hands reached for my bags. I struggled through 
the rabble and out into the evening cool of the moun- 
tains. There was a long plaza before me, lined with 
trees; a splashing fountain; the monument; and a 
rambling white building along one side of the open 
space—the company hotel. The scene was an odd 
mixture of beauty and ugliness, the natural pic- 
turesqueness of the Latins contending with the 
gaunt, ugly iron and steel of the industry that had 
made the town. And all about, as I walked across 
to the hostelry, were soft voices and laughter. Girls 
strolled by in couples, arm in arm, one shawl thrown 
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HEADIN’ SOUTH 13 


passer-by out of the corners of their dark eyes, with 
the half-inviting, enigmatical look of the young 
Spanish women. 

An ore-train rushed by on a hidden track around 
the mountain above, the long white beam of its head- 
light, like an accusing finger from heaven, sweeping 
the slope. There was the sound of stringed instru- 
ments in the air, and a soft rustle of wind in the 
trees. It was dream-like and refreshing; here at 
last was a life quite remote from the hustle and 
bustle of American cities. I drank deep of it in 
those few feet across the plaza. 

From this exoticism I stepped into the business- 
like interior of the American hotel. The lobby was 
a bare white room with a counter on one side, and 
a stairway, and looked as deserted as an impres- 
sionistic stage-setting when the play is over and 
the cast gone. But after I had had my dinner,—an 
American meal of the lunch-counter variety, served 
in a barren hall at one end of the building,—I re- 
turned to find the characters beginning to appear. 

One by one, a dozen men drifted in and lined up 
at the counter. At first glance they were romantic- 
looking individuals, rough types in the conventional 
dress of the place—worn leather puttees, old army 
breeches, and colored shirts. They proved to be 
rather a silent crew, who seemed to know one an- 
other’s thoughts before they were spoken, from hav- 


14 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


ing lived so long together. When twenty or more 
were gathered in the bare hall, I learned the rea- 
son for their coming. My friend the Texan began 
drawling names, from behind the counter, and 
passing out mail from a pile he had before him. One 
could see at once that it was a rite. The men who 
got mail every day received theirs silently, and the 
ones who never got any mail but always came, hop- 
ing against hope, made their usual jokes: ‘‘Ain’t 
that check from my rich uncle in yet?’’ with a laugh; 
‘“‘Here! you got more ’n your share!’’ I sighed, 
and wondered if I should get as homesick for news 
as they appeared to be. 

But the jazz-fiends arrived to break up my mel- 
ancholy musing. Two young American school- 
teachers with bobbed hair and sport skirts, faintly 
echoing flapperism, appeared with an escort of half a 
dozen youths quite unlike the old-timers of the mail 
hour, in dapper collegiate clothes and slicked hair. 
They trooped upstairs, where, following, I found 
a lounge furnished with wicker sofas and chintz cur- 
tains. In the corner stood a big phonograph, and 
a second later I was greeted with the rhythm of the 
latest Broadway jazz music. A great civilizing 
agent, the modern dance; and Cobre takes it very 
seriously. The first question a new arrival is asked, 
if he is under forty, is, ‘Can you do the Chicago?’’ 

The brass vigor of the music, the exciting pulse 


HEADIN’ SOUTH 15 


of the danee after the soft atmosphere of the plaza, 
struck me. Two races were represented here, each > 
worshiping its own idols, in temples facing each 
other across a broad street. But I had one more god 
from the North to meet. 

There was an audience of grizzled men, standing 
apart in one corner, to whom dancing was evidently 
a sport to watch, not to indulge in. Joining them, 
I was at once accepted as an onlooker, and conversa- 
tion sprang up. The eldest and most ferocious eyed 
me narrowly and cautiously asked, ‘‘Do you play 
golf?’’ I made the mistake of admitting that I did, 
and that I had my clubs with me. Inside of a min- 
ute I was forced back into my room; my sticks were 
unwrapped from the burlap they had been packed 
in, and human life and electric-light bulbs were 
in immediate danger; for it turned out that there 
was a six-hole course laid around the valley. There 
were desert fairways and the oiled sand greens of 
the Southwestern courses, but an intensity of en- 
thusiasm prevailed in comparison with which the 
spirit of St. Andrews was that of the disinterested 
spectator. 

Luckily, I kept quiet the rest of the evening, for 
after we returned to the lounge the discussion gath- 
ered momentum. It settled down to serious con- 
Versational golf. Gone was all the listlessness of 
converse among intimates. There was a fire, a 


16 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


fury now, born of righteousness of principle: the 
man who ‘‘ran up his approaches’’ and the man 
who ‘‘dropped them on’’ were on the verge of vio- 
lence. The ‘‘long driver’’ was patronizing to the 
man: who believed in a ‘‘straight game.’’ On and 
on it went, unceasing. I listened, amazed, until at 
last I remembered that I must be up by six in the 
morning to be on my way, and, unobserved, slunk 
to bed in my big whitewashed cell. And as I fell 
asleep I thought to myself what a ghastly place this 
world must be for a man who wanted to get away 
from ‘‘the greatest game of them all’’! 

I was awakened in the chill blackness of early 
morning by the long-drawn-out scream of the six- 
o’clock siren, a horrible form of torture I was to 
know better as time went on. I was to take the 
seven-o’clock train ‘‘up the hill’’ on the mine rail- 
road. I found it at last, a little narrow-gage affair, 
made up of ore-cars with a miniature coach at the 
end, half passenger, half baggage. I was about to 
climb in at what I thought was the civilized end, 
when an American foreman spotted me and shouted, 
‘‘Wirst-class this way, buddy!’’ and pointed to the 
baggage half. The legitimate seats had long since 
been surrendered to the crowding natives, and the 
aristocracy grouped itself on the milk-cans forward. 

The ride up was a trip on a scenic railway. The 
diminutive train panted up a thousand feet in some- 


HEADIN’ SOUTH 17 


thing like five miles, and as the sun rose it opened 
out limitless vistas of jumbled mountains. Two 
hand-cars full of laborers ‘‘hitched on’’ at the end 
of the train, as small boys in the city used to hitch 
to beer-trucks. I had my first glimpse of Mexicans 
in the early morning, and realized why most Ameri- 
cans consider them a race of desperados, for be- 
fore the sun is up the Mexican deems it unsanitary 
to leave the lower part of his face uncovered. The 
men huddled on the rocking hand-car had their 
blankets wrapped about them, drawn up across their 
faces and over their noses, their hats pulled down 
until only beady eyes were visible. The trainmen, 
too, had bandanas tied about their mouths, as if 
ready for a masquerade. And all were hunched up, 
sinister-looking, shivering in the light chill which 
seemed to go through them like a knife. 

We climbed so steadily that when the train finally 
came to a stop and threw me and my milk-can seat 
across the car, I thought there couldn’t be much 
more of the world above us. We had reached the 
top of the world, all right, but there was still the 
ascent to heaven to be made. The track we had 
come up wandered across a little yard and, mortified 
at being able to go no farther, dived into the black 
mouth of a tunnel which opened into the mountain 
on the other side of the clearing. We were about 
_ half-way up the side of a great peak which loomed 


18 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


straight up above us. On its side three thin rib- 
bons of steel shot up, ending at the top in a black 
button. I followed the crowd to the base of these 
lines. The tracks, for such they turned out to be, 
ran down into the ground, and by the time I had 
gotten near, a little wooden platform before them 
was crowded with pushing and shoving Mexicans. 
‘“‘Hop on!’’ said the foreman, who had accom- 
panied me. f 
‘On what?’’ I replied. But the answer was dem- 
onstrated to me, for the wooden platform gave a 
lurch and began to climb up the side of the hill, all 
by itself. A bag in each hand, overcoat flying in 
the wind, I leaped aboard, with nothing but a toe- 
hold and a sense of balance to keep me there. The 
platform was at the end of a cable and was being 
slowly but surely pulled up. It was my introduc- 
tion to the ‘‘incline,’’ the ascent of which is a ver- 
tical six hundred feet. The car goes up a forty-five- 
degree slope. Above fifty feet the cable teetered ; 
that is, it got swinging and pulled the platform by 
long lurches and sudden stops. The passengers went 
rocking back and forth like strap-hangers in the 
subway. Only, here were no pleasant walls to bound 
against, and, in most places, to lose in the battle 
that developed meant a fall of twenty or thirty feet 
to the mountain-side. Those on the inside, being 
perfectly safe, immediately began to expand and 


HEADIN’ SOUTH 19 


take more room; while those on the outside, cling- 
ing to the very edge of nothing, fought desperately 
to hold the few inches they had. I had always un- 
derstood that the route to heaven was precarious, 
but I had never thought I should get as many thrills 
out of it as I got out of that ride. 

As we approached the top, a swarm of little Mexi- 
can boys surged in behind us and made a descent 
down the hill which would have turned a New York 
urchin, coasting on one roller-skate, green with 
envy. Each boy had the remains of an old tin can, 
flattened out into a seat. This he placed on a rail 
and, sitting on it, balanced, his feet crossed in front 
of him on the rail to act as a brake, he cast off. 
Within a second he shot away down the incline like 
a paper dart thrown from a balcony. Down the 
whole terrific drop he sped like a bolt of lightning. 
This sort of coasting puts tame sports like skiing 
and toboggan-sliding in the class of pastimes recom- 
mended for invalids. 

I was told a story of the spectacular escape of 
one of the bosses during the revolution. The mine 
was taken, and he was the last man to leave before 
the invaders arrived. All transportation had long 
since been stopped; he was left stranded, high 
and dry. When he saw at last that there was no 
chance of holding out, he tore the iron door off his 
cellar, and he and his wife carried it over to the 


20 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


top of the incline. The story goes that he was pur- 
sued and fired at. The detail adds spice, anyway. 
But what is certain is that he put his iron door 
on the tracks, loaded his wife and two children and 
all their baggage aboard, and went down the hill 
at about sixty miles an hour. The marvel is that 
they weren’t all killed, but they found a hand-car 
at the bottom on which to get to Cobre, and made 
good their escape. 

At the top of this engine of iniquity I felt sure 
I had reached my goal, but no. We were in heaven, 
surely,—the train we had come up on was no more 
than a pencil mark below,—but we were on the 
wrong side of this promised land. A little electric 
motor and a flat-car had still to do their work and 
pull us through the peak of the mountain to the 
town on the other slope. And so, seated once more 
in the midst of my luggage, still dazed by my trip up, 
I made my first entrance into the mine through a 
screeching, winding passage, with familiar noises of 
air-drills about, and the sound of blasting coming 
occasionally through the rock. The great mountain 
I had come up enclosed the mine, and the operations 
were going on within, from the surface down to 
eighteen hundred feet below. , 

Well, here I was, on the battle-field at last! New 
worlds to conquer; a new race to study; an adven- 


HEADIN’ SOUTH 21 
ture as real as that of Sir Lancelot riding after the 
Grail. And then, filled with these highfalutin 
dreams, I put down my bags and reported at the 
superintendent’s office. 


CHAPTER II 
PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 


EKALITIES were not yet to rouse me from my 
ecstatic state, however. I had arrived at the 
busiest period of the day, and the entire official force 
was underground. So the superintendent’s secretary 
philosophically told me to ‘‘take five,’’ which is 
miner’s slang for stealing a rest, and look the place 
over. When given advice of this kind I rarely bandy 
words. I thanked him and went abroad to see what 
was to be seen. 

I had come out upon El Monte from the dark of 
the tunnel, abruptly, and my first impression of it 
was of a perfectly good city which some giant hand 
had taken and carelessly folded up into a drinking- 
cup. The tunnel came out on the inside of the cup, 
nearly at the top, and the whole town lay below, 
stuck to the sides. Whoever made it was a little too 
enthusiastic, or wasn’t quite sure how to go about 
it, for he forgot to put a bottom init. The sides, a 
crumpled mass of them, came together three hun- 
dred feet below the edges, in the sharpest of V’s. 


There was no valley, only a little hewn-out circle, at 
22 


PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 23 


the bottom of which was the plaza, a tiny green oasis 
in a desert of black housetops. 

I wondered why such a spot was chosen for a town 
site, but miners go to the rock that pays, and the 
mountain does not come to Mohammed. After one 
look at the background of the picture, I was struck 
by the thought, ‘‘The town might just as well be 
here, for, obviously, in all the world there is no level 
spot!’’ As far as I could see, for miles upon miles, 
until the horizon lost its identity and melted away 
into the distance, were nothing but sharp-pointed 
peaks. A veritable storage-house of mountains; a 
parking-place for them, six thousand feet up, on top 
of the world. All the mountains that would fit no- 
where else,—great towering snow-capped monsters; 
grotesque misshapen contortions; little pug-nosed 
affairs,—every conceivable variety that no one 
wanted, Fate or Geologic Force had jumbled to- 
gether and piled up on the shelf there, to wait until 
they were needed in the world below. 

EK] Monte de Cobre seemed to be high above the 
peaks, for as one looked away they spread out below, 
a prospect awe-inspiring in its immensity. Some- 
times in the early morning I have seen the clouds 
settle below the camp and fill the valleys as the 
flood must have filled them under the ark; I have 
looked out, as Noah must have looked out, to find 
the world gone, hidden from view, and nothing 


24 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


about but a great white sea with cloudless heavens 
above. 

After one of Monte’s rare snow-storms has hap- 
pened in from the north and passed, I have traced 
its wanderings many miles across the face of the 
earth, by the broad white trail it left on the moun- 
tain-tops. It used to give me a queer feeling to see 
the working out of nature’s caprices below me: as 
though I were looking down from heaven, or as if 
the world were a stupendous ship, with me in the 
crow’s nest. But the town itself was as unusual as 
the view. 

Partly niched in and partly built out on an ar- 
tificial cliff, clinging to the steep side of the moun- 
tain, was the plateau on which I had come out. At 
one end arose the great black head-frame over the 
main shaft of the mine, three enormous whirling 
wheels on top showing where the cages—the ele- 
vators of the mine, hanging from the steel threads 
that passed over the wheels—hurtled up and down 
through the center of the earth. About this sinister 
gallows-frame were grouped the galvanized iiron 
sheds which housed the compressed-air plants, the 
shops, and that guardian of lives below, the hoist 
engine. Opposite these lay a long white one-story 
building. One end of it housed the mine offices, be- 
fore which half a hundred Mexicans were lounging, 
and the other the company store. Beyond, the 


PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 25 


plateau wandered off around the mountain, an aim- 
less contour line lost among cantmas and greasy 
shops. 

This level seemed, as I inspected it more care- 
fully, a dividing line. The Mexican town swarmed 
up to it and covered it; but above, the odd hundred 
feet before the topography came to a sharp point at 
the top, was reserved for the American quarter. A 
path which degenerated into a stairway led on up 
through two lines of white houses with gardens 
fenced off from the roving burros. So steep was the 
slope that the floor of one house was on a level with 
the roof of its neighbor down the hill. The hillside 
had an odd terraced effect. 

At one time there had been perhaps half a dozen 
peaks to cap all this, but the mining excavations be- 
low had dropped them, one by one, into the ground. 
All across the top of the camp there were vast ex- 
cavations, ‘‘glory holes,’’ where whole mountains 
had been blasted into bits and run down through the 
mine to fill the cavities from which the copper had 
been taken. I walked up the hill to examine one, and 
found, literally hanging over the edge of it, an ex- 
cellent tennis-court. But just outside the base line, 
on the side nearest the hole, ran a long, deep crevice. 
Little by little, as the ground was being pulled from 
under it, the tennis-court was falling into the mine. 
I learned later that plans had been made for a new 


26 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


court; but when I left Monte, the old one was still 
being played on as it slipped, inch by inch, like a 
glacier, down the side of the hill. 

Along the edge of one of the first glory holes to be 
drawn down into the mine, I was told, there was a 
railroad, and one day a steam locomotive was pass- 
ing along the track, when the ground under it 
opened. The engineer jumped, but the locomotive, 
being more adventuresome, toppled in, head first, 
and went down, little by little, over a hundred feet 
into the mine. It is still down there, in an old de- 
serted cave, a little too much the worse for wear to 
be rescued, but looking very proud of its feat. 

The American quarter seemed deserted, and as 
the day was still young, I strolled down the hill. A 
zigzag trail, half steps, ran from the mine offices to 
the plaza below. The peaceful quiet of the colony 
gave way to the swarming life of the Mexican town. 
At my first step I was almost run down by a cow- 
boy, on horseback, plunging at a gallop up the steep 
hill, He was the genuine article, too, with huge 
leather chaps and enormous silver spurs. He 
- lounged, half sideways, in a great rocking-chair of a 
saddle. Yes, and there were his six-shooters and his 
lariat, and his hat at a rakish angle. Making way 
for him and dodging his horse’s flying hoofs were a 
swarm of pedestrians. 

There were all kinds of folk here: children, half- 


PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 27 


naked, shouting and playing; old women in the in- 
evitable black hood; young girls, school-teachers 
from the cities of Mexico, modernized and proud of 
their imported (from Arizona) finery; workmen in 
the picturesquely careless dress of miners the world 
over, hurrying, at a slow walk, to their work; a sot 
still carrying on from the night before, seated in the 
middle of the path, roaring at the top of his lungs, 
soon to fall asleep across the highroad. For the rest 
of the day, or at least until the fumes of alcohol 
_ passed and he could stagger home, traffic would pick 
its way around or walk over his prostrate body. 

On one corner stood a group of street merchants: 
venders of native cigarettes (twenty for two and a 
half cents) and candy—no, not simple candy but con- 
fections! There were tables of chocolate soldiers 
and candy statuary: men on rearing horses a foot 
high, marvelously put together, and sweets of every 
color of the rainbow. The bright hues were softened 
by an inch or so of encrusting dust, but they still 
had a strong appeal for the Mexicans. Beyond were 
the roulettes—big iron arrows, two or three feet 
long, clumsily mounted on a pivot, which one spun 
for ‘‘ diez centavos’’ to determine whether or not one 
was to be the proud recipient of a two-penny knick- 
knack. The proprietors of these contrivances sat 
sleepily behind them, nodding to each passer-by, be 
_he peon or foreman: ‘‘Buenas dias, senor,’’ and, if 


28 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


he was a customer, ‘‘Como le va?’’—the beginning 
of a long formula of greeting. 

Directly above the native shops stood the com- 
pany store, extending a credit the former could not 
compete with, and though a peso (about fifty cents 
in gold) is often an exceedingly satisfactory profit to 
make in a day, they appeared to exist in great 
number, their proprietors happy and contented to 
sit all day in the sun. Near the stands, squatting 
tailor fashion on the ground, was a group watching 
two old men playing at a game something like 
checkers. A piece of cardboard, lined in pencil, with 
pebbles, black and white, for men; and the ferocious 
intensity and seriousness of an international chess 
match. 

The streets were really clean, and I marveled until 
I met the town scavenger. It would have been fool- 
ish to waste the good money and the carefully con- 
served energy of man on a non-essential, so the 
entire work of street-cleaning was entrusted to that 
all-important animal the burro. Over the line he is 
known as the ‘‘Arizona canary’’ because of the 


_ghastly ds of agony he emits as a sign of friend- 
ship; 41 every town there is an official burro- 
cate’. 1ctioning as the dog-catcher does in other 
par»; .e country, and a burro pound for the safe- 


ke vd» of stray burros. But here the little animal 


PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 29 


is left to his own devices, which fit singularly well 
into the scheme of things, as he is an excellent scav- 
enger. As an animal he is the most mangy, abused, 
moth-eaten, woebegone creature imaginable, and 
still the toughest. He has entire charge of the trans- 
portation system, and with a pack on his back carries 
everything, from coal to ice. He is driven with pro- 
fanity, physical violence, and exhortation, all of 
which he meets with stoicism, if not disdain. 

I once had the pleasure of seeing a burro and a 
land-slide meet. In front of the office lay one of the 
largest of the glory holes, now filled with broken 
rock. A stray burro had nosed down into it, looking 
for some chance cigarette butt or an old piece of 
paper of which he could make a nice light luncheon, 
when suddenly the cliff above shook off a few dozen 
tons of rock. The boulders came down with the 
noise of thunder and jarred the whole side of the 
hill. I was watching from the office, and as a cloud 
of dust went whirling up I shook my head. No more 
worry for one poor burro! The cloud hung a minute 
and then settled, and there in the midst of the fallen, 
rock stood the little animal. There wswroa. 
annoyance on his face, and he twitched ne"e 
irritated. Then he nodded his head and climbed out 
of the hole. How it chanced that no rock had 
touched him, I cannot tell, but I am quite sure he was 






30 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


disturbed not by the danger but because the slide 
had covered up the choice morsel he had gone down 
after. 

But on this particular morning the burros ap- 
peared to be quite safe, from nature at least. I 
stepped aside in my walk to let a long train of them 
pass, their leader having made it plain to me that 
he was n’t going to make any concession. They had 
a sort of wooden frame set on their backs, over worn 
blankets; and each carried in his frame three hun- 
dred-pound bags of cement. There was a little mare 
near the end of the line and a tiny foal running along 
behind her. When the caravan halted half-way up, 
for a breathing-spell, the foal trotted in and helped 
itself to its breakfast. 

As I wound down, I seemed to be sinking into a 
great sea of sound. An animal chorus rose to greet 
me. There was the crowing of innumerable cocks,— 
who, by the way, violated the ordinances of all well- 
regulated chanticleers and announced their bravery 
all through the night,—the braying of burros, an 
occasional neigh from a horse, and the squeals of 
numberless litters of pigs. Intermingled with this 
confusion of sound were the shouting of children and 
the crying of many babies, and above the whole rose 
the unceasing thunder of the shops. Day and night, 
by the head-frame of the mine, the shops roll out 
their anvil chorus, as the steel is hammered into 


PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 31 


rigid sharpness so that it may take up again its 
battle with the rock; for sharp steel is the life-blood 
of a mine nowadays, when air-drills drive shafts into 
hard rock by inches to the minute. 

Over all the swarming life of the valley this cease- 
less roar spreads a blanket of sound, while above 
stands the enormous black sentinel that is the head- 
frame, a symbol to all, a warden of lives below the 
surface. 

At last in my wanderings I reached the heart of 
the town, the plaza. It was a tiny circle, made of 
concrete to withstand the floods from the hills, sur- 
rounded with waving green trees and wooden 
benches. In the center stood the band stand with its 
red, green, and white flag waving above. Then, in 
the middle of the day, it was almost deserted, but 
at one side was a concrete hand-ball court, a relic of 
the penetration of American recreation policies into 
the South. This seemed the center of attention for 
the minute, and being by nature inquisitive, I 
stopped to see what it was all about. 

A group of ragged urchins were playing at bull- 
fighting. The bull, the smallest and most helpless of 
the lot, was enveloped in the remains of an old khaki 
blanket and had a long stick in each hand which he 
held to his head for horns when making an attack. 
There were four fighters, and the etiquette of the 
bull-ring seemed to be strictly observed. The pica- 


32 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


dor was a-horseback, mounted on a fiery broom, and 
armed with another with which he tortured the ani- 
mal. After each assault he galloped to one side and 
drew off his hat, a ragged little cap, with a preten- 
tious sweep and a flourish, acknowledging the 
cheers of the populace. Two others were the 
banderilleros—the men who infuriate the bull by 
sticking darts into his back. They were untiring in 
their efforts. The last fighter was the matador, 
standing correctly aloof as his dignity demanded, a 
long wooden sword ready for the fatal blow. 

The bull charged hither and thither, with tre- 
mendous ferocity, now inflicting a ghastly wound on 
the poor horse, now dashing into the disheveled shirt 
that was the red scarf of the banderillero and letting 
out horrible groans of tortured defeat when he 
missed his tormentor. The. crowd of idlers ap- 
plauded and exhorted at every turn, until finally the 
bravest of matadors stepped forward, bowed, and 
drew his sword. The bull halted and pawed the 
ground with rage. He shook his head from side to 
side in anguish, one horn straight in the air, the 
other pointing menacingly at the enemy. There was 
a moment of tension; then, with a great gesture, the 
killer launched forward and sank his sword to the 
hilt, under the bull’s arm. The moans of the dying 
animal were terrible to hear as he sank to the cold 





THE GATES TO AVERNUS 


The guardian of lives below: the hoisting machinery over the shaft; the shops 
and a jagged glory hole (1 to r) 





‘‘DOWN THE HILL’’ 
In the Mexican town where a doorstep is the roof next door 


a. ae 


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“THE tinpapy 
OF tHE 
UNIVERSITY GE Tumors 





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bat] be ‘ a 


PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 33 


concrete. When I left, the former matador was just 
receiving the horns, for his turn at being bull. 

I climbed back up one of the side streets of the 
town. The rows of stepped-up houses ran up on 
each side, each house with a little wooden balcony 
before it. Every balcony had its own tangled garden 
in rusty tin cans, its assortment of half-washed 
clothes drying in the sun, and a disorder and color 
that defied the geometrical lines of the company- 
built houses. I could not see the interiors, but there 
was a constant traffic, going in and coming out, of 
toddling babies and odd-colored pigs. At my ap- 
proach the street had been full of the latter, but, ter- 
rified at the sight of me, they set up a prodigious 
squealing, and each and every one sought cover. 
And cover meant the house of their master. They 
dashed in, greeted with curses from the interior, and 
came cautiously back to stick an inquisitive snout 
around the corner of the doorway to look me over. 
The children, dirty babies dressed in minute frac- 
tions of shirts, were frankly curious until I came 
too near. 

The street itself was no more than a washed-out 
gulley. When there is a rain, in this country, it 
carries half the mountain-side down with it. Mid- 
way up the slope, in each street, stood a concrete 
watering-trough around which a dozen women were 


34 - IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


struggling to wash a few handfuls of clothes or to 
fill their battered pails. In the midst of the desolate 
mountain wilderness, in spite of squalor and pov- 
erty, the scene had a quaint picturesqueness worthy 
of Naples. 

As I reached the end of my ascent back to the 
office, I was witness to one of those disturbances 
which are so upsetting to an American in the Latin 
countries, a wayside exhibition of cruelty. I was 
panting my peaceful way up the hill when suddenly 
a child, three or four years old, dashed out of one 
of the houses and ran, screaming, across my path. 
Literally on its heels came a little old woman in a 
filthy blouse and petticoat, holding a piece of rope 
in one hand. In the middle of the way, not ten feet 
from me, the child stumbled and fell on its face, 
howling. The old hag pounced upon it like a down- 
swooping vulture and seized it by the nape of the 
neck as one would catch a wayward kitten to bring it 
back to its mother. 

But the treatment was anything but suitable for a 
kitten, for the woman, in the blindest rage I have 
ever witnessed, brought the rope down on the de- 
fenseless body. I was so horrified I could not move. 
Three times she wrapped the lash around the child, 
the cord cutting in with a vicious snap. Then, 
shrieking with anger, she threw the baby from her, 
kicked it twice, and walked back into the house. I 


PHYSICAL IMPRESSIONS OF EL MONTE 35 


ran forward, awake at last, to pick the beaten thing 
up, but it was still alive enough to distrust me, and, 
moaning and shaking with sobs, scrambled away and 
erawled under the porch of one of the houses 
opposite. 

I stood unnerved. At the well the women were 
still washing and elbowing one another out of the 
way to get at the water. Other children were play- 
ing about as if nothing in the world had happened. 
A sound of singing issued from the house whence the 
woman had come. It was all in a day. I shook my 
head and walked on. 

At the top of the hill I was treated to a second ex- 
hibition of cruelty, and here, at least, had a chance 
to work off my feelings. The head of a burro 
train—an old, broken-down creature, heavily laden 
with fagots—had fallen under his load and would 
not move. So the driver had come up from the rear 
and, instead of helping the burro up by lightening 
its load, stood by and beat it with a stick. The ani- 
mal made attempts to rise, but failed. So the man 
threw aside his stick and resorted to more drastic 
measures. He leaped in front of the beast and 
kicked it in the face. I came up in the midst of this 
performance and went for the driver, my remon- 
strances interspersed with selections from my mine 
vocabulary. For one who did not know a word of my 
language, he understood me remarkably well. He 


36 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


snarled for a minute, and then took off his hat and 
bowed. The rope securing the wood was caught in 
a slip-knot on top of the pile, and this I jerked loose. 
We came the nearest to real action when he saw the 
wood rolling on all sides down the hill. But the ani- 
mal got to its feet at once and stood still, ready to be 
loaded again, so I judged the man’s punishment suf- 
ficient. The long-drawn-out whine of the siren be- 
gan to rise above the roar of the shops, to tell the 
community it was eleven-thirty, so with a parting 
salutation to my friend I continued on my way. 


CHAPTER III 
MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 


HEN I finally did succeed in seeing the super- 

intendent, I found him a small man with 
watchful eyes and a habit of frowning. Like most 
of the men in authority in Mexico, he was remark- 
ably young for his position—I should say in the 
thirties. He asked me to have a seat, and offered 
me a cigarette. I admit that, as an ex-day laborer, I 
was n’t used to such treatment, and I was almost 
overcome. 

He began by explaining to me a little about the 
organization of the mine. For a big industry it was 
extremely simple. On the other side of the line, 
whence I had come, an order had to pass through 
several assistants—general foremen, division fore- 
men, day and night foremen, shift bosses, and so 
on—to get from the superintendent to the workman; 
a never-ending process, in which all personal touch 
was lost, and usually the spirit of the order as well. 
In Mexico the authority was much more directly 
relegated, and was backed by racial superiority. The 


mine, the superintendent told me, was divided into 
37 


| 


} 
| 
ny 
} 


| 
| 


38 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


sections, three or four levels underground to a sec- 
? 


‘tion. Over each division was an American foreman 
and an engineer. Above them was only one general 
foreman, and then the superintendents. I was to be — 
one of the engineers. 

This settled, he began to explain to me a few of | 
the problems I should be up against. My job was 
that of a combination engineer and paymaster; that 
is, on the engineering measurements I was to make 


' out the pay-sheets. On just settlements, he told me, 


rested the entire morale of the mine. In Monte, 
where there were no traditions, there was much 
active thought and a real contact between the ‘‘man 
higher up’’ and the laborer, and since the only re- 
sponsibility was to guarantee the profits, three 
thousand miles away in New York, nearly every 
known method of adjustment had been tried out. 

In a mine there is a choice of three methods of — 


paying the men. First, a man may be paid a definite 
| amount each day, and put under supervision to make 
| sure that he earns it. With Americans, where there 


is a certainty of something resembling a conscience, 
and especially when the labor is such that what is a 
good day’s work can be exactly determined, this 
method is a fair one. Men will strike a level, after a 
time, where their output is fairly uniform. But with 
such an organization as that at Monte it is hard to 


MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 39 


speed up production, and I am looking at the matter 
from the operative’s point of view, which is the view | 


one acquires first in a foreign country. It may be- | 
come necessary to offer special inducements to men | 


in order to get them to work harder; to set a stand- | 
ard of work and pay a bonus for what a man has. 
done above that standard. The bonus system is the | 


one most commonly in use in Arizona. The third | 
system is work by contract, similar to the piece-work 
system in a factory: payment only for what a man | 


actually does. 

They are all perfectly good economic plans, and 
very pretty on paper. But a mine presents special 
problems which affect the choice. The surface plant, 
to begin with, costs so much to operate, and the over- 
head expenses, salaries, interest on the investment, 
and so on are so great, that the utmost speed in pro- 
duction is essential. A mine has a definite life: there 
is only so much raw material, and when that is gone, 
all the machinery, the shops, and the plant are very 
nearly worthless. 

Moreover, there are physical problems: the work 
underground is spread out over vast areas. There 
were, at Monte, over a hundred miles of openings 
below the surface, and the work was carried on 
from one end to the other. It would have taken hun- 
dreds of men to watch every working place, and it 


\ 


40 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


was necessary to adopt a system which would put 
men on their own responsibility. The necessity in- 
volved, at once, a study of the individual. 

The Mexican, the superintendent told me, is a 
peculiar animal. On ‘‘day’s-pay’’ he will stall until 

one is wild with exasperation. He is not essentially 
a mercenary person, and if guaranteed his daily 
wage and offered a bonus for additional labor, he 
will think it over pretty carefully and decide that, 
after all, life is short and work a prodigious nui- 
sanece, and why should he break his back for a few 
extra pennies? But given a contract, and the assur- 

“ance that he will get so much money for every ton 
he mines, and that it doesn’t matter how long he 
takes doing it, or how often he sits down to contem- 
plate life, he will work with a vigor which is re- 
markable. 

All this is very nearly quoted. The superintend- 
ent went on to say that the company used to pay by 
the number of cars of ore run out from each working 
place each day. The plan seemed to work well, until 
the company began to check up the tonnage so re- 
ported with the tons received at the mill and weighed 
there. There was only a twenty-five percent differ- 
ence! For every four tons the mill handled, word 
came up from underground that five had been mined. 
The Mexican counts very badly when a slight error 
will give him a few extra dollars. 


MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 41 


Iam getting ahead of myself, but I remember that 
once I had a stope which was still being paid by the 
ear. And every week I went down to the ryador 
(the gentleman whose job it was to count the cars 
going out) and copied the daily report of a stope 
still being paid on the old plan. Well, one day I was 
in a hurry and I copied five days’ work instead of 
six. I got a total of, say, one hundred cars and paid 
the contratista (contractor) accordingly. The next 
day the contratista came up to the office in a great 
rage and declared that he had been cheated. He said 
he had one hundred and five cars to his credit, and 
he produced his own record of the cars mined every 
day. As was my custom, I said I was very sorry and 
would look into the matter. It did seem odd, as he 
had gotten out about a hundred and fifty cars the 
week before. So I put on my ‘‘digging clothes’’ and 
went down into the mine again to see the ryador. I 
told him how much I had paid, and asked him if that 
was right. 

‘‘Of course not; the senor has made a mistake; 
the contratista in question has one hundred and 
thirty-five cars! You forgot Saturday, when he 
rolled thirty ears before my very eyes!’’ 

Well, here was a discrepancy! The man himself 
said one hundred and five, the checker one hundred 
and thirty-five. It remained a problem until I com- 
pared the daily lists and found the checker’s average 


os 


42 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


just five cars a day over the contractor’s. What had 
happened was that they had come to an understand- 
ing that the ryador was to pass him five cars a day 
extra—just for good luck (and a dollar a car profit). 
But with my mistake I had cut off not only his addi- 
tional graft but some of the work he had actually 
done. And the contractor had given himself away, 
in his indignation, by telling me the number he had 
really trammed. If he could n’t get his rake-off, at 
least he wanted to be paid for what he had done. 

But, to get back to the lecture I was receiving: I 
was told that to avoid just such occurrences as this 
the company had decided to add to their staff an 
engineering department—to send Americans down 
into the mine actually to measure the work done. 
My job was to go down once a week to every working 
place on what was to be my ‘‘run,’’ and measure the 
rock broken and trammed, and on the basis of my 
measure to see justice done. 

‘‘Tn the first place,’’ my superintendent went on, 
‘‘vou ’ve got to be a diplomat. The success of the 
system, the whole morale of the mine depends on the 
way you handle the men. They don’t understand 
everything that goes on, but they are pretty canny 
about estimating their own work. Absolute justice 
first; and if you must temper it, temper it with more 
money.’’ 

And with that he closed the interview and took me 


MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 43 


in and introduced me to the chief engineer. The 
division engineers, one of whom I was to be, were 
just coming up from their morning’s work. They 
came stamping in, one by one, wearing big muddy 
boots, faded trousers smeared with dirt, a khaki 
coat flapping with note-books, and a ‘‘digging hat’’ 
cocked at a rakish angle. The majority were boys 
just out of college, and looked like characters from 
a novel by Richard Harding Davis. As they came 
in, each threw his lamp to the little Mexican helper 
trotting at his heels, who took it away to clean it. 


Vv 


\ 


The magnificence of such luxury—a man to clean” 


one’s lamp—made a deep impression on me. I felt 
a great longing to become one of these swashbuck- 
ling characters and roam around the inside of the 
earth with a helper at my side and authority at my 
back. 

There was a good deal of banter back and forth 
and much introducing, and I found myself attached 
as apprentice to a chap of Irish descent, Michael 
Leary, from Arizona University, who was to teach 
me the ropes. He gave me some new lights on the 
situation. 

‘‘Well,’’ he said, ‘‘the thing ’s experimental still, 
but we ’re making progress.’ I ’ve just come from 
climbing up a hundred feet of wet rope to find the 
thing with two strands out of three cut at the top. 
The chief’s experimenting crossing an adding- 


1G 


44 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


machine with a monkey, and hopes to get a first- 
class engineer as a result!’’ 

I sat by his side all afternoon and watched him 
plot on maps the notes he had taken in the morning: 
‘‘Pen-and-ink drawings in seven different colors 
showing the home life of a low-grade ore body.’’ 
Each of the different colored inks represented a 
week’s work, and the new color showed the advance. 
From the maps he computed the volumes of rock 
broken, in cubic meters, and then made out the pay- 
sheets. There is a law, he told me, that men must 
be paid every day. So the office advances every man 
in the mine three pesos a day credit at the store. 
That is deducted from the pay-roll we make out. 


~The contract for each working place is given to one 


~ 


man, the contratista, and he gets his own trabaja- 


_dores (laborers) to work for him. So our only deal- 
| ings were with the contratistas. The contracts are 


worked out so that if an operation is well run, each 


_man will receive an average wage of about five pesos 
a day, and as the contractors rarely pay their 


helpers, most of whom are peons, more than four 
pesos, they make a peso a day on each of their men. 

We figured that one man on the pay-roll that 
afternoon would clean up twenty dollars a day in 
gold for himself—a tremendous amount. When he 
had computed the final figure, my instructor paused 
to scratch his head. 


MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 45 


‘‘Aw! I can ’t do that!’’ 
‘Why not?’’ I asked. 


‘Why, he ’ll lay off a week, and when he comes | 


back he won’t do any work for another week, and 
then he ’ll come up here raising hell because he only 
makes five pesos when two weeks ago he made 
forty!’’ 

‘‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’’ (I was 
solicitous for the cause of justice.) 

‘Oh, I ll pass him about half of it and keep the 
rest on the books. In a week or two he ’ll run into 
hard luck, and I ’ll give it to him to help him out!’’ 

That was my introduction to the fact that all 
Mexicans are children and have to be treated accord- 
ingly. The engineer has to be a sort of amateur god. 
Jf a man runs in luck on a contract, he is eventually 
paid the whole amount earned, but if there is trouble 
and he does not make his expenses, he is given them, 
anyway. Of course if it becomes his practice to fall 
short, one looks around for another contratista, but 
work underground is so hard to measure accurately, 
and the difficulty of it varies so rapidly, that the real 
basis of measurement is common sense and a desire 
to be just. | 

The next day I had my first real trip in the mine. 
I started off with a bad break. I dressed myself in 
the costume in which I had been mining in the 
States. Over each knee of the trousers there was 


H 


46 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


the telltale threadbare spot that had been worn by 
hours of fighting a ‘‘muck stick.’’ I thought they 
would at least prove I was no greenhorn, but I 
stepped out in front of the Mexican helpers and 
found myself greeted with a great shout of derision. 
The comments I mercifully did not understand, but 
they were translated for me to the tune of ‘‘Where’s 
your shovel?’’ ‘‘An American has come to show us 
how to muck!’’ and more. As a matter of fact, I got 
considerable standing among the men later by tell- 
ing them I had been a contratista in the States, but 
this first day the evidences of menial work did not 
take too well. I ’m afraid I was as self-conscious of — 
the costume which told of an apprenticeship on the 
line as most men are of their uniforms now that the 
war is over. 

/y I went down with my foreman, Donald Stewart, 
known on top as the ‘‘Fighting Scotchman,’’ and 
underground, I learned later, as ‘‘the stork,’’ be- 
cause of the crouching walk that his height made 
necessary in the rounds below. Virtually all the 
bosses had nicknames among the miners. There 
were the ‘‘marmoset,’’ the ‘‘parrot,’’ the ‘‘mouse,’’ 
and so on, each name suggested by an eccentricity. 

Before I went below, Don took me in and showed 
me, on the ‘‘base map,’’ where we were going. This 
map is a big sheet that looks like a drawing of lower 
Boston with the names of the streets omitted. With 


MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 47 


his finger he pointed out our course and wound 
around a mile and a half in about six seconds. Then 
he said, ‘‘Come on.’’ I have a clear impression that 
I remembered nothing. 

We went underground, and he led the way down 
winding drifts, which are little five-by-seven-foot 
tunnels, up ladder-ways, in and out; then suddenly 


_he remembered he had to get back ‘‘on top.’’? So 
_he said casually: 


‘You can wander around and look things over; 
you’ve got the whole morning.”’ 
I certainly needed it. I was in an old part of the 


mine, cut up in a thousand different directions by 


twisting, turning openings, half of them ending in 
blank walls. When I started to attempt an escape, 
I spent nearly an hour getting back to the place 


_where he had left me. Every now and then I would 


come upon little signs,—‘*‘ Al tiro Nuevo,’’ or ‘‘ Al 
hiro Esperanza,’’—but as I still did n’t know more 
than ten words of Spanish, it did n’t dawn upon me 
that these were directions, ‘‘ Al tiro’’ meaning ‘‘To 
the shaft.’’ I had a little carbide cap-lamp that 


held only enough fuel for two hours. The farther 


I went, the less I knew where I was. And I kept 
thinking of some experiments I had assisted in at 
college, when we built cardboard mazes and let mice 


into them to see how long it would take the creatures 
to find their way out. The mice were much cleverer 


48 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


at it than I was; they rarely took over ten minutes 
to escape. But they got so excited doing it, and 
seemed so utterly terrified, that my heart bled now 
at the memory of their torture. Some horrible god 
of retribution had sent me all this way to experience 
agony such as I had given them. 

Being lost in a mine was a weird experience. My 
footsteps (they always seem to accelerate when one 
does not know where one is going’) echoed with hard, 
hollow sounds as I strode over track ties or sank 
into an empty nothing when I struck long stretches 
of mud beneath my feet. My light seemed to grow 
smaller, and illuminated only the little circle in front 
of my feet. It was impossible to preserve a sense of 
direction; the drifts wound and turned; and as there 
was no perspective, I had no way of telling how 
much I had changed my direction. I went on faster 
and faster, stumbling over débris and striking my 
head on low spots in the ‘‘back,’’ my dou ee tracks 
leading nowhere. 

At last I realized that I was above the level on 
which we had come in, and decided the best thing to 
- do was to get down. The ladder-way had vanished, 
but I found an ‘‘ore pass,’’ a hole down through the 
rock, opening at one side, with a rope secured above 
it. I began to wonder how long the rope was, be- 
cause I remembered ridiculing what I considered the 
stupidest accident I ’d seen in the United States. A 


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MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 49 


Polack had been working in a stope near me and in 
some way dropped his lamp down the chute into 
which he was throwing ore. He was in the dark, 
and helpless. But all he had to do was to sit still 
and wait until the boss came around. He didn’t 
even know enough to take advantage of his oppor- 
tunity to do nothing. He remembered that there was 
a rope hanging over the chute, and he got hold of it 
and began going down after his light. The chute 
was eighty feet deep. The end of the rope came 
after he had gone fifty. And there he was, sus- 
pended. He did n’t have the strength to pull himself 
up, and he hung until he could hang no longer and 
then fell thirty feet and broke his best leg doing it. 
They found him at the bottom later. His leg did n’t 
seem to bother him, but he sat there cursing that 
rope, from the depths of his soul. He had put his 
faith in it and it had basely betrayed him. 

While I was still debating whether or not to risk a 
similar joke on myself, a workman came along. I 
asked him how to get. to the shaft. I asked him very 
politely. He shrugged his shoulders and replied, 
**zNo habla Espanol?’’ We agreed on that, but it 
did n’t answer my question, so I motioned him ahead 
and followed. He led me to the stope he was work- 
ing in. The half-dozen men who were shoveling ore 
into wheelbarrows and wheeling it away, stopped 
with one accord, at my entry, and gathered around 


50 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


me. I explained the situation very carefully—in 
English. They waited until I had finished and then 
began to debate among themselves what it was I had 
said. Finally they all shook their heads and lapsed 
into silence. I had never before been in a foreign 
country where I could n’t speak the language, and 
my helplessness now was agonizing. It was a sort of 
cross between being dumb and having one’s hands 
tied, or like a hideous dream in which one wants to 
say something and cannot. | 

I was on the verge of being completely discour- 
aged when I hit upon the happy idea of an impro- 
vised marionette show. I took from my pocket a 
plumb-bob on a string, and hung it over one finger. 
Then with the other hand, using the fingers for legs, 
I gave an imitation of a man walking and climbing 
upon the plumb-bob. My audience watched, breath- 
less, while I pulled the plumb-bob, with its cargo of 
one man, up a couple of feet to my knee. Then I 
walked my man out, or off, and pointed up to show 
where it was he had alighted. It worked like a 
charm; with one accord they howled out their ap- 
preciation: ‘‘Hl toro! el tiro!’’ and burst into roars | 
of laughter. When I was finally escorted out, I 
found the station not a hundred feet from the bottom 
of the ladder-way leading out of the stope! 

The Mexican has an extraordinary ability to un- | 
derstand pantomime and to translate the most 





MY JOB AND THE FIRST DAY 51 


atrocious attempts at Spanish. In France, use every 
French form correctly, and speak the language with 
grammatical excellence, and if you have not the ex- 
act inflection of the section of country you are in, 
your words will mean no more to the Frenchman 
than Sanskrit would to an Ohio farmer. Even ob- 
serve, in our own United States, an immigrant try- 
ing to ask his way in a railroad station, and blunder- 
ing only to the extent of putting an ‘‘e”’ on the end 
of every word. Not only will the American fail to un- 
derstand him, but he is very likely to be pretty in- 
tolerant about it; the man who can’t speak English 
and speak it well must be an idiot—and a scoundrel, 
too, or he ’d have taken pains to learn! But in 
Mexico, where even the poorest peon speaks better 
Latin-American Spanish than ninety percent of 
Americans speak English, one meets with the most 
extraordinary tolerance. 

The general foreman at Monte was a hard-headed 
Cornishman—one of the ‘‘Cousin Jacks,’’ as the 
miners called them. He had lived in Mexico twenty 
years, but he spoke the most horrible Spanish I have 
ever heard, barring my own. He used nine tenths of 
his verbs in the infinitive only, and his pronunciation 
was excruciating. But he spoke as fast as the most 
excitable Spaniard, and the men never missed a 
trick. 

Spanish is not a difficult language to acquire, as 


52 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


languages go. The pronunciation is fairly easy to 
master, when one has learned that ‘‘e’’ has the 
sound of our ‘‘a,’’ and ‘‘1’’ the sound of our ‘‘e,”’ 
that ‘‘h’’ is silent, and a few other simple rules; for 
Spanish is pronounced exactly as it is spelled. The 
grammar of Latin-American Spanish is identical 
with that of Castile, and there are only minor differ- 
ences in pronunciation. The lisping of the older 
form is distasteful to the Latin-American. 

Near the border as we were, the natives had 
adopted a large number of English words which lent 
an odd touch to their speech—mining terms espe- 
cially—tracké, posté, and so on, taken in for the ad- 
dition of the ‘‘é.’? I once saw an advertisement in 
which the word quequt appeared. It puzzled me so 
that I sought enlightenment of the Mexican with 
whom I was studying the language. He looked at 
me a minute and grinned. 

‘<Say it,’’ he told me; ‘‘say it several times!’’ 

I did, about a dozen times before the meaning 
dawned on me. The word was the good old English 
‘‘cake’’ with the usual ‘‘é’’ on the end, and spelled 
in the Spanish manner. 

But the problem of mastering the language was 
still ahead of me, and for a long time to come I 
was to rely on pantomime, the rote memory of 
half a dozen phrases, and the natural good nature 
of the men to get me through. 


CHAPTER IV 
I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 


OR two weeks I repeated the experiences of my 

first days. In the morning I would go under- 
eround and explore. I never got lost again, because 
I formed the habit of carefully mapping out my 
route before I essayed a trip to the lower world, 
but the strain of finding my way was always with 
me. I learned, too, the names of my contractors, 
and delighted in them. There were Jesus and Jesus 
Maria, and a number of marvelous rolling names— 
Roque Rios, Roberto Ramos, and such—and Fer- 
nand Fernandez. I made the rounds with my in- 
structor, who was called ‘‘Don Miguel’’ under- 
ground,-and I soon acquired the title of ‘‘Rafael.’’ 
We started work at seven, following the shift below, 
and remained underground until noon; the after- 
noons we spent computing, in the office. The details 
of the ‘‘system’’ were legion, and I found myself in 
a daze, trying to remember my way around the in- 
side of the mine: which prices went with which 
stopes; and the division of these prices into allow- 


ances for ‘‘puwder,’’ ‘‘breaking,’’ ‘‘mucking,’’ 
53 , 


54 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


‘‘tramming,’’ and a thousand and one extras. And 
with all this went a horrible tongue-tied feeling as 
I groped my way into the language. 

At last, one day, after I had been doing the actual 
work of the division, under supervision, for a week, 
I went down to the office and was informed that 
I was to take over Division I. ‘‘The thrill that 
comes once in a lifetime’’! The chief handed me 
a Brunton compass and told me to go out to the 
‘‘caddy house’’ and get a helper. The Brunton com- 
pass, a rough surveying instrument carried in a lit- 
tle leather case on one’s belt, was the symbol of 
office. (It was like being given your sword by King 
Arthur of Round Table fame, if you want to ro- 
mance over business.) The ‘‘caddy house’’ was a 
little shack back of the office where the engineers’ 
helpers, los ayudantes, lounged, waiting for instruc- 
tions. 

In the early morning the scene here was one of 
tremendous activity. The ‘‘boys’’ (as they were 
called, although some were old men with families) 
were very busy rushing about filling the carbide 
lamps and. collecting the impedimenta for the morn- 
ing’s work. The engineers always came out at the 
last moment and were in great haste. 

“‘La cmta—dos plomos—no mas!’’ (‘The tape— 
two plumb-bobs—that’s all!’’) Every one shouted 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 55 


and swore and enjoyed himself generally. The 
‘‘boys’’ jabbered, ‘‘Le’’s go! What t’ ’ell!’’ and 
were sure to forget at least half of what they were 
told to bring. 

I found a new man who was to be my inspiration, 
and asked him his name. ‘‘Salomon, senor,’’ he re- 
plied very respectfully, because it was the first time 
he ’d seen me. He was rather a handsome chap 
of twenty-two or three, tall for a Mexican but still 
diminutive beside any Anglo-Saxon of more than 
average height. Dressed in an army sweater of 
khaki-colored wool, what was once a pair of 
breeches, and a sort of cocked-hat effect, he had, 
nevertheless, a cavalierish air about him. As for 
me, I had learned my lesson, and now sported an 
enormous pair of trench boots, bright-blue trousers 
that disappeared into the tops, with a pirate’s bag’ 
at the knees, and an old campaign hat. Salomon 
was taken with the boots: he said he ’d never seen 
any as big as they were, and was all admiration. 
When I finally paraded over to the shaft, I felt like 
Robinson Crusoe with my man Friday at my heels. 

My division took in the three top levels of the 
mine. A perverse fate had put my foreman, Don 
Stewart, and me, both of us considerably over six 
feet tall, on a ‘‘run’’ where the ground was so 
_‘“‘heavy’’ that it had caved most of the drifts to a 


56 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


height of about five feet. I developed a lope, bent 
double, with my arms hanging almost to the ground, 
which left no doubt of my ancestry. 

I was n’t quite sure what means to use to estab- 
lish my authority over Salomon, but after some ex- 
perimenting I found that treating my new acquisi- 
tion as a human being worked out as well as any 
method. We became, in time, the best of friends. 
He took an intense personal interest in my Spanish, 
and would stop in the midst of anything he was 
doing, when I made too flagrant a mistake, and 
correct me with some dignity, repeating the cor- 
rection until I got it right. From the first Salomon 
refused to believe I was an American. It happened 
that in an early conversation I put together a sen- 
tence in Spanish, intended to be facetious, to the 
effect that English was a harder language than 
Spanish, and that I had been studying it for years 
and had n’t mastered it yet. Then, as I was n’t sure 
that my statement had registered, I repeated it in 
French, hoping a language nearer his own might 
help. I didn’t realize the impression I had made, 
until, much later, I overheard him explaining to a 
contractor that I was a Frenchman and very clever 
to be able to speak English as well as I did. 

Working with Salomon constantly and carrying 
on as extensive conversations as I could for the sake 
of my Spanish, I learned a great deal from him 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 57 


of the Mexican mind and how it works. The first 
thing that began to be apparent was the man’s ac- 
tual inability to worry. I hadn’t realized, until I 
worked with a Mexican, how great a part of the 
Anglo-Saxon’s life is taken up with a regard for 
the future. The Anglo-Saxon seems to be a worrier: 
he has deeply at heart the success of every en- 
deavor; the future is a pretty real thing, even to 
the lowest of the race. The Mexican, on the con- 
trary, seems to be physically incapable of sustained 
worrying. It just isn’t in him. 

Salomon, at twenty-two, was the proud father of 
two babies. For a long time the younger had been 
the weakling of the family, and during one of our 
rare cold spells it fell ill. Salomon reported its 
condition to me day by day, imitating a racking 
cough the wretched little thing had contracted. The 
baby’s illness continued for a week, and finally 
ended in tragedy. A. snow-storm climaxed the cold 
spell; there was not enough wood to supply the com- 
munity, and Salomon, with only his day’s wage of 
a dollar and a half gold, had little to spare for com- 
fort. The day after the snow-storm I was without 
a helper. But the second day he reappeared, a hide- 
ous specter of sorrow, his face drawn and his eyes 
still red. He said, very simply, that his baby had 
died. I was greatly touched and all that day could 
not give the boy an order. He was moody, silent, 


58 IN AND UNDER MEXiCO 


and depressed, and finally I sent him on top and 
told him to go home to his wife. 

I wondered, vaguely, how long this would con- 
tinue, and was, myself, a little worried. I expected 
to hear, in the morning, of Salomon’s suicide. But, 
instead, when I went out to the ‘‘caddy house’’ the 
next day, I found him laughing and joking with the 
other boys and so normal as to have forgotten to 
fill my lamp. Underground some careless reference 
of mine to the storm brought back his sorrow, and 
he turned from me and I knew he was crying. But 
the next moment his grief had passed and I heard 
of itno more. ‘'wo weeks later he was as drunk as 
ever, at the dance in town, and fighting with his 
wife as usual. He was really deeply and sincerely 
| moved, but it wasn’t in his nature to retain the 
emotion. After all, the incapacity was a saving 
grace, for the children died like flies at the least 
cold, or continued heat. 

But that first day he worked with me, Salomon 
was in an excellent humor. Despite low wages, the 
position of ayudante de ingeniero is a pretty coveted 
position, for the ayudantes work only three or four 
hours a day and the rest of the shift they can sit 
around in the sun before the office and comment on 
the girls who pass by. And underground, with 
the authority to stop work that interfered with our 
measuring, and the opportunity to gossip with the 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 59 


men in each working place, Salomon was immensely 
content. 

We had a regular schedule of working places to 
measure each day, and Salomon took the measure- 
ments while I checked them, to be sure that no hu- 
man element entered into the transaction (Salomon 
had many relatives underground who might benefit 
by his mistakes), and noted them down. 

But first a little about the mine itself. The object 
of mining is to get out the ore which is in the earth, 
and to get it out with as little as possible of the 
waste rock that surrounds it. That is obvious. To 
do this a shaft is sunk from the surface to the ore. 
At Monte there are three shafts, and the ore—vari- 
ous combinations of copper and _ sulphur—is 
distributed over what is called a ‘‘mineralized 
area.’’ That is, if it were possible to walk through 
the rock, one would come on the ore, el metal, in 
bunches, like big raisins in a cake. These bunches 
le around the side, and a few in the center, of 

what is a formation shaped very like a pear. The 
skin of the pear, and in some places the core, is 
the valuable part. It stands upright in the ground, 
nearly a mile long and half as wide, and the shafts 
go down, one on each end and one in the middle, to 
eighteen hundred feet below the surface. 

| Once the shafts are down, the next thing to be 
done is to dig along the area that has the copper; 


60 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


‘‘drift’’ is the correct term, and a drift is nothing 
more, as I have said, than a small tunnel which 
does not come out on the surface. These drifts are 
run out at hundred-foot intervals down the shaft 
and driven the circumference of the ore, until finally 
a huge skeleton is formed, with the main shaft for 
a backbone and the little tunnels for ribs. 

At Monte a tunnel, driven into the base of the 
mountain from the foot of the ‘‘incline,’’ taps the 
backbone of the mine about half-way down. The 
ore that is broken above this is thrown down; that 
from the lower levels, lifted up; and both are loaded 
into railway cars and pulled out by electric motors. 
Steam replaces electricity at the tunnel mouth, and 
the rock goes down the hill to the Cobre mills. 

By the time the backbone and the ribs are fin- 
ished—that is, the development work is done—the 
amount of rock to be mined is fairly well known; at 
least the geologist, whose business it is, thinks he 
has an idea of it, and a geologist is nothing more 
than a trained guesser. He sees ore in the wall of 
a drift, and guesses how far back it goes. If he 
guesses right, he is a good geologist. 

But to return to the mine: Once the metal is 
found, the real fun begins, because it is necessary 
to get it out; and get it out without bringing the 
earth above down on one’s head. : 

Any excavation from which ore is taken is called 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 61 


a ‘‘stope,’’ and a stope may be, anything from a> 
gopher-hole to the great open cuts where the rock — 
is taken out by the steam-shovelful. There is a 
great variety of intensely interesting and ingenious 
methods for saving labor and one’s neck in the steps 


Glory Hole 








ORE BODY 


Wwrnnrnsy 





CROSS SECTION SKETCH OF A COPPER MINE 


that lie between the rock as nature has left it and the 
copper that goes to the mint to make the pennies 
men sell their souls for. 

All the methods, however, depend first on break- 
ing the rock. In the olden days men used to go 
down with a chisel and a hammer and bang away 


62 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


at the rock until they cut an inch hole perhaps two 
feet deep. Then they filled the hole with powder 
and touched it off. The work was laborious—one 
man with a small hammer, ‘‘single-jacking,’’ in 
miner’s slang; or two men, one holding the drill and 
the other pounding it, ‘‘double-jacking.’’ There is 
a real thrill in holding the steel for a good double- 
jacker. He takes a full swing with a huge sledge- 
hammer, hardly looking where he strikes. If you 
hold the steel in the same place, he ’Il go on hitting, 
fair and square, as fast as he can get the hammer 
back for another blow. But move it an inch or 
two to one side, and he will come down in the old 
spot once more, and the chances are ten to one that 
one of your hands is in time and space coincident 
with it; and that sledge-hammer is moving when it 
comes around, and moving fast! I know because 
I’ve tried it, and from an American miner I got 
no sympathy for my bruises but plenty of cursing 
for not holding the iron steady! 

But only the old-timers are double-jackers now, 
‘because the air-drill has come in to do their work. 
' The compressed-air drill is nothing but a pneu- 

matic hammer that strikes a steel drill some four 
hundred times a minute. There are all kinds of air- 
drills—hundred-and-eighty-pound monsters mounted 
on iron bars wedged between the floor and the 
‘‘back’’ to hold them for their attack; long, lean- 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 63 


looking drills called ‘‘wiggle-tails’’ because they 
have a tail which comes out like a giant wasp’s 
sting, to push the steel forward as it cuts; and lastly 
little ‘‘pluggers,’’ illegitimate children of the devil, 
which are not mounted at all but which you hold 
against your stomach and force into the rock. 
Every one of the four hundred blows is reflected 
off your middle, and usually a stream of water, 
theoretically forced down through a hole in the steel 
to lay the dust, is playfully sticking its finger into 
your eye. I can get madder with a plugger, and 
do less about it, than with any other machine I ’ve 
ever played with. 

Machine drills now put in ‘‘rounds of holes,’’ six 
or more feet deep, depending on the toughness of 
the rock, and will drill twenty or thirty holes a 
shift. Instead of the old black powder, high ex- 
plosive (nitroglycerine held in suspension in sticks 
of wood pulp) is used. In spite of its power, it is 
fairly safe to handle and has to be set off with a 
special detonator. However, the very ease with 
which it is manipulated is in itself a menace, be- 
cause it is not quite so harmless as it seems. 

About a week after I arrived at the mine, a 
typical accident took place on my run which killed 
two men and blinded a third. Green men had been 
blasting boulders in a stope, and one of the charges 
hadn’t gone off. The right thing to have done 


64 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


was to drill a new hole m another part of the rock. 
\ But, not knowing the correct procedure, one of the 
men went back after the smoke had settled, found 
the boulder untouched, and put his drill into the 
same hole, on top of the dynamite, and turned on 
the air. There was a man standing beside him, look- 
ing on, and another shoveling, fifteen feet away. 
The latter was blinded and almost lost his reason. 
The other two were, of course, killed instantly. It 
was the very thing the safety-first men most warned 
against: never drill in a ‘‘missed’’ hole. It isn’t 
always bliss to be ignorant. 
_ With modern drills and high explosives, with the 
‘ possibility of breaking thousands of tons of rock 
a day, has come the necessity for an organization 
of methods, a systematic mining which is like the 
laying out of a great battle. And as in a ereat 
battle, carried on far from the light of day, un- 
derground, against the forces of nature, there are, 
as I have said, many methods of attack. Hach has 
_a name, and even as there are men in an army 
trained to fight in trenches, in open country, or in 
the air, so are there miners brought up and trained 
to fight their battle with the earth, some in one 
kind of stope, some in another. 
The simplest system we used is called ‘‘cut and 
fill.’’? It is started by simply drilling the roof or 
‘‘back’’ of a drift full of holes and shooting it down, 





paaes ay es, esoymM ‘zone vy} pue ‘OLavuabuy ap azunpnfip ‘WouLoTeg 
ANO NOISIAIC JO MAYO DNIYAUNIONG WHOL 








I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 65 


and repeating the process until a huge chamber, 
perhaps a hundred, two hundred feet long is opened. 
Rock is broken around a ‘‘raise,’’ which is nothing 
but a vertical elevator shaft through the rock, with 
no elevator in it. And the rock that is broken is 
thrown down through a system of these raises, until, 
perhaps three hundred feet below, after a long, 
thunderous trip down, it is caught in a pocket in the 
rock and is drawn off through gates, into buckets in 
the shaft, to be hoisted to the top. It is easier to 
break rock down, so the work crawls up around the 
raise, the broken ore falling behind. That is the 
ecut’’? part. 

But after a time the back is so far above the 
floor that it can’t be reached without a staging; 
besides, it is getting dangerous. It begins to 
“‘slough off,’’ and great slabs keep dropping down. 
If there is a man under one, he won’t have to mine 
any longer; he can stay underground for the rest 
of time. First there is a little warning dribble 
of fine pebbles, perhaps a tiny noise, and then— 
zump!—down out of the darkness comes a piece 
about the size of a trolley car. So, to remedy these 
little unpleasantnesses, the stope is filled with waste 
rock to within five or six feet of the back before 
more rock is broken. This is the ‘‘fill’’ part and 
it steadies the ground so that the work may go on. 
It was to provide fill for the great stopes under-— 


66 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


ground that the mountains on the surface were hol- 
lowed out and dropped in. La Luna Fill Hole, the 
main chute down which the waste is thrown, runs 
nearly two thousand feet down into the mine. A 
hundred feet away, through solid rock, the thunder 
of the falling stone can be heard. The huge boulders 
break themselves up by bouncing from side to side 
en route, until at the bottom they are small enough 
to be drawn out through holes and distributed. 

This cut-and-fill system is very simple, but the 
mine worked by it is rather a curious sight. Usu- 
ally there is a long rock chamber, the far end of 
which is lost in darkness, with an arching vault of 
a roof perhaps twenty feet above the fill. There 
is a hole in the center of the stope which leads up 
like a chimney above this queer house. To get in, 
one must climb, like Santa Claus, down the chimney, 
on a rickety ladder or often only a rope. The stope 
is filled with the roar of two air-drills, and lighted 
dimly by half a dozen little lights stuck here and 
there near the workmen. Two men are drilling, and 
four others, stripped to the waist, are mucking 
broken rock into the chute. As one enters, both 
drills stop suddenly and the silence is ominous. But 
it is the quiet before the storm, because presently, if 
one is unlucky enough to be an engineer, the con- 
tratista will burst into violent protest of the meas- 
urements of the week before. 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 67 


Speaking of ominous silence, I am reminded of 
a two-hundred-dollar mistake I once made in one of 
these stopes. Cut and fills are difficult to measure 
because one has to locate enough points on the walls, 
which are very irregular, to compute, from the pic- 
ture one makes with the information gained, the 
total volume of the place. Subtracting from this 
the volume found the week before, gives the work 
the contractor has done during the measuring 
period. But the process is a long one, and to speed 
it up I used only to measure the parts of the stope 
in which new work had been done. One week I 
went down and asked a contratista—Roberto Ramos, 
by the way—where he had worked. Whether he 
misunderstood me or not, I can’t say, but he pointed 
out only half of the area he had covered. So, of 
course, I passed him only half of what was really 
his due, a difference of two hundred dollars. The 
next week, when I came down, he met me with tears 
in his eyes. He told me he thought I was his friend. 
He wanted to know what I had against him. Then 
he depicted, with graphic pantomime, the state of 
horrible woe his family was in because of my mis- 
take. I went over my notes, found my computa- 
tions were correct, and told him there was nothing 
I could do about it. They were correct, as far as 
I knew. 

At last he grew angry and began to talk faster 


68 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


and faster. Like an amateur radio fan, I can re- 
ceive code only up to about twelve words a minute, 
and I was soon left far behind him. Faster and 
faster, wilder and wilder; he had a pick in one hand, 
and I began looking around for Salomon to back me 
up. When suddenly the flood stopped. There was 
dead silence. Evidences of the most horrible emo- 
tions passed over his countenance. For at least 
five minutes my heart stopped beating. Then the 
most incomprehensible transformation took place. 
A radiant smile broke over his face. He shrugged 
his shoulders and put out his hand. I didn’t get 
all he said, but it was to the effect that what were 
two hundred dollars in his life: his family wasn’t 
starving any more than usual, and he could get 
drunk free at his brother’s wedding on Saturday. 
And—and this was very touching, since he was 
really my friend and liked me—if I needed the two 
hundred dollars, why, he was very glad I had 
taken it! 

And the funny thing is that it wasn’t pose. He 
was quite sure that since he hadn’t gotten the 
money, I had, and equally sincere in saying that 
it didn’t matter and I was welcome to it. The im- 
pression under which he was laboring wasn’t one 
I wished to leave, so I spent the rest of the day run- 
ning a check survey of the place. During the whole 
procedure he smiled in the most friendly way, and 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 69 


when I finally found what was wrong he greeted 
with another shrug the news that he was to be paid: 
**Muchas gracias, pero no le hace.’’ (‘‘Many thanks, 
but it does not matter.’’) 

Cut-and-fill mining, with its great stopes gnawing 
their way up through the mountain, is the method 
chiefly used at Monte. But there are plenty of other 
methods of attack to be seen. There is the less spec- 
tacular ‘‘square-set’’ plan. This is the good old 
American mining method, probably employed more 
than any one other because it can be used in almost 
any ground and is fairly cheap and safe. 

- When a cut and fill is opened too wide, the back 
begins to slough off. If this happens often, and 
occasionally, for variety, instead of little pieces, the 
whole back falls in and closes the working up tight, 
with whatever and whoever happens to be in it, it 
becomes fairly evident that it would be wise to 
steady the roof. That is what square-setting does. 
A square set is a rough frame of timbers—four posts 
with ‘‘caps’’ and ‘‘ties’’ across the top to form a 
little house. The rock is broken exactly as before, 
but just enough is cut out to build the house in. 
The pieces of timber are brought down, dragged into 
the stope, and put together as a child’s toy building 
or a card house is put together. Only, here are posts 
eight inches or more in diameter and eight to ten 
feet long. When the puzzle is put together, it is 


70 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


wedged tight against the roof, and, once inside it, 
the miner is quite safe. Another frame can be placed 
right beside it, when the rock is broken out, or on 
top of it, until the card house is as extensive as de- 
sired. When it has been built up for two or three 
stories, it is just as wise to fill the lower stories 
with waste rock, leaving a little hole to crawl up 
through, as was done in the other method. 

Square sets are not so impressive as the larger 
stopes. A series of them resembles an apartment- 
house in construction, before the partitions have 
been put in. There are long rows of posts, and the 
floor is usually littered with tools—in Mexico, at 
least. Two or three miners will be about, their 
lamps stuck on the posts, bucking a drill in one cor- 
ner to cut out for a new ‘‘lead’’; fitting the pieces 
of a set together in another part; and mucking into 
a chute, a black hole which opens ominously in the 
center of the floor. 

However, square sets are not so safe as they might 
be. All the measuring of ground can be done from 
the ends of the timber and I used to go in and sit 
down on a convenient beam and take my notes, while 
Salomon hopped about from post to post with his 
tape. Once a little piece of rock about the size of 
my fist came loose and, falling between the timbers, 
came near breaking my head and the contratista’s 
heart. My head was easy enough to explain, be- 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 71 


cause the rock came right down on it. The fragment 
had to fall only about three feet, but that was far 
enough to break the rock and knock me out. (I 
have a remarkable facility for catching little things 
like that underground.) But the hurt to the con- 
tratista’s heart was more subtle. When I came to, 
bloody and very profane, the old boy was standing 
over me wringing his hands. He was a little wizened 
chap with a long, straggly mustache and an aroma 
that penetrated. I kept on swearing, but paused 
long enough to assure him that I wasn’t killed. He 
shook his head and muttered: 

‘‘And to think of all the work I’ve done this 
week for nothing!’’ adding, ‘‘Mucho trabajo, poco 
dinero,’’ which means, ‘‘Much work, little pay.’’ 

I wanted to know, immediately, what that had to 
do with my head. 

‘‘Oh, senor, I cannot expect you to pay me when 
you have had your head broken in my stope!’’ 

Much as I regretted having to reassure him, he 
did get his money. 

There is one other scheme of mining we used 
which was interesting for the strangeness of its 
physical aspect—the ‘‘top-slice stoping’’ of very 
heavy ground. One climbs down a raise to find, at 
the end of a winding passage, a cramped sort of 
woodchuck hole, filled with a forest of posts and 
inhabited by a couple of half-naked Mexicans with 


72 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


bright beady eyes and a nervous way of moving. 
There is, very likely, an unearthly hush, because it is 
just as well to be listening for little noises in rock 
and timber which spell danger. Unless a man knows 
what he is doing, a ‘‘slice stope’’ is a ‘‘bad actor.”’ 

When the ground is too heavy for even a square 
set,—that is, when it is broken up and gathers 
weight enough to squash two-foot posts like matches, 
—one of the ways to avoid trouble is to start at 
the top instead of the bottom. But the top of 
the ore is often a long way underground, and the 
problem of guarding one’s head still remains. So 
a rather clever practice has been devised. A whole 
floor, ten or fifteen feet high, is dug out and a great 
many props put up to hold the back, temporarily. 
When the excavation is finished, a stick of dynamite 
is tied to each post, every one gets out, and the dyna- 
mite is exploded. All the posts in the place are 
snapped at once, and the roof comes down, crash! 
In falling, the timbers get all tangled up, and, 
crushed together by the pressure above them, they 
form a sort of mat. When the mass has settled, the — 
miners come up from below and dig another level 
out underneath it, this time propping up the mat, 
which is now over their heads. 

And so the stope continues downward, the house 
being shot to pieces after every floor and a cellar 
dug under it. But the mat doesn’t always come 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 73 


down as nicely as it might, and sometimes it stays 
up altogether. The whole thing ‘‘takes weight,”’ 
the timbers begin to ‘‘work’’ and sing all kinds of 
ghastly witch melodies—long-drawn-out whines, lit- 
tle eerie songs, and odd rumblings. And as the 
props begin to split and mushroom out at the head, 
streams of fine sand come in through the cracks. 

In the folklore of old miners, there is a mysteri- 
ous character called ‘‘Blind Tom’’ who is responsi- 
ble for these demonstrations. It is ‘‘Blind Tom 
workin’ ’’ who moves the ground above one, who 
makes timbers grunt and groan as he labors, whose 
perspiration is the deadly trickle of sand before a 
fall. Blind Tom is very careless when he is in a 
hurry, and very clumsy in his sightlessness. As he 
strides about he is apt to step on old openings and 
squash them flat. Only a little hiss and a blast of air 
down the tunnels, the blow of a giant hammer, give 
the bosses warning that Blind Tom is still at his 
work. 

Measuring these stopes was the cross Salomon 
had to bear throughout his career with me—a real 
cross because they were forever falling in and need- 
ing emergency attention. Once a stope had caved 
in, it was impossible to estimate the tonnage, so 
that when one was on its last legs the contratista 
would telephone up to the office and I would have 
to collect Salomon and dash down to get what I 


714 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


could before the crash. My part of the job was 
hoe easy. I had to sit by the exit, with a compass 
that had a mirror attachment, and catch the re- 
flection of Salomon’s light, to read the direction. 
But to give me the necessary information, he had 
to dash into the most dangerous corners, where, usu- 
_ally, rock was raining down and the timbers were 
groaning horribly, and hold the light until I could 
find it with my instrument—a process something 
like shooting a gun over one’s shoulder with a 
mirror, in the dark. 

These were the only times Salomon and I had 
real differences. He was absolutely positive that I 
sat there and refused to hurry, simply that I might 
enjoy his perturbation, and he would come in in a. 
violent rage and absolutely refuse to ‘‘take another 
shot,’’ until I pointed out another spot, and then 
he would trot away, damning me to an eternal mine. 

As a matter of fact, few men get hurt in these 
stopes, because they are so constantly on the look- 
out. It is in the places that give every evidence of 
being safe, where a man lowers his guard, that Fate 
strikes suddenly and without warning. The only 
bad accidents in ‘‘slices’’ come when the roof caves 
between a man and his escape. Then he is doomed, 
unless a rescue party can dig in before the rest gives 
way, 

There are many other methods of mining—caving 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 75 


systems in which men cut under a body of ore and 
let it fall and break itself; ‘‘shrinkage’’ stopes 
(when the broken ore is left in the excavation and 
men work standing upon it), and many others. 
They are all part of the miner’s life, all bare-handed 
struggles with nature. 

For a long time I got inspiration out of being in 
the front line. There was a fascination about laying 
out a piece of work and seeing men go in and do 
it as I told them. With me, of course, it was purely 
a mental thing, because Don, my foreman, did the} 
real planning, and, once I had finished the engineer- 
ing end, there was nothing to do but wait until the 
work was complete, and pay for it. But to watch 
it grow under my eyes entranced me. 

I came to know every contractor and what he was) 
worth, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that 
I was trusted. The thorn in my side was Jesus 
Maria. Jesus was a good-natured idiot who spent 
his time losing one contract after another because 
he would n’t work more than three days a week. We 
were short of men, so we gave him new work in 
the hope that a new place might inspire him for a 
while. The result was disappointing. If anybody 
else, or the same man with a different name, had 
been as lazy, I really should n’t have minded, but in 
his case the fact that ‘‘Jesus’’ is pronounced ‘‘H4a- 
sus’’ didn’t have the effect it should. 


716 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


To the Mexicans, there is no thought of sacrilege 
in the common use of a name which most religions 
have set apart. He is very much at home with his 
religion. He drinks wines known as ‘‘The Milk of 
the Virgin Mary’’ and ‘‘The Tears of Christ,’’ and 
names his animals for saints, and his children for 
divinities. As an old foreman once replied when I 
mentioned the profanity we were in the habit of 
using underground, ‘‘Well, the Lord do enter into 
our conversation quite a bit!’’ 

Salomon, however, was something of a free 
thinker. He once delivered one of the most illumi- 
nating lectures on religion I have ever heard. It 
was before I spoke much Spanish—I speak little 
enough now—and he supplemented his talk with 
dramatic demonstration. We were sitting under a 
cross by the shaft, waiting for the cage, and, think- 
ing of the symbol over us, I asked him what he 


thought of prayer. He gave me the most scathing 


look. 

‘“When a man has little food, his stomach is 
empty,’’ he said. ‘‘Oh, how an empty stomach 
hurts! It is necessary to fill it with something, and 
words cost little.’’ He rubbed his stomach and be- 
gan to howl: ‘‘O God, help me! Mary, have pity!”’ 
Then he went on: ‘‘But a horse is loose and a hun- 


gry hombre steals it and sells it for a peso. In a 
little while he gluts himself with food. Ah, his 


a a 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 77 


stomach is full and there is no room for God!’’ and 
he snapped his fingers at the cross. 

I don’t know exactly how this attitude affected 
his standing in the village, but in the mine even 
the most religious were very tolerant of it, and he 
was fond of expounding his views. I have never 
been associated with an underground community — 
which had much real religious feeling; perhaps the 
fatality of the life explains it; I cannot tell. 

With some spark of desire for truth, Salomon had 
picked up an amazing amount of misinformation. 
He was always saying, ‘‘In a little while, no more 
Mexico!’’ until I finally asked him whether it was 
he who was going, or his country. He said he was; 
he was going to Los Angeles. I asked him how he 
was going to get there. Well, it cost five pesos to 
get to the line, and, once in Arizona, he could walk 
over to Los Angeles. And money—you get lots of 
it there for doing almost nothing—twenty dollars 
a day even. I was going to remonstrate with him 
on this point, until I thought of the building trades, 
and felt it best to hold my tongue. When questioned 
as to what the city was like, he displayed similar 
ignorance. There were buildings, probably, as big 
as the whole mine frame, and trains in the street; 
but the air of gayety, the excitement—that was what 
he was going for. He would take his young wife 
and his remaining child along, too, and he thought 


ne, 


78 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


he would pick up a horse so that they could all 
ride around the city. 

Once I had taken over the division, my afternoons 
became busy indeed. From the time I got on top, 
had a shower, and started to work in the office, until 
four-thirty it was work at top speed with pen, pen- 
cil, and adding-machine. The men measured in the 
morning, and the work done had to be figured up 
and paid for in the afternoon. But four-thirty and 
the end of the mathematical side did not mean a 
rest for the weary. For the ‘‘social-tea’’ session 
began. That is, the shift got off underground and 
the contratistas began to come in to get the news 
of how they had made out. The weeks after fiestas 


' were the worst, because then nobody worked hard 


enough to make any money, and every one needed 
it badly. The day after a big holiday, about half 
the engineering force could be seen making a 
stealthy get-away by the back door and ‘‘hoofing it’’ 
up the hill before some particularly fiery contratista 
could locate them and hear the bad news of a poor 
week. A new chap from California was so upset 
by his first interview with one son of toil that the 
next week he hid in the vault and very nearly got 
locked in for the night. 

It took me some time to get used to the Latin 
temperament. My old friend Roque Rios’s calls 
were typical. He came in every Thursday, the day 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 719 


on which he was measured, as regular as clockwork. 
I had the advantage of knowing exactly what his 
expenses were and how much he had cleared, usually 
a good margin; and, besides, I was up on a high 
stool behind an imposing desk. He was all polite- 
ness. 

*“Buenas tardes, senor! how are you?”’ 

“‘Very well; and you?”’ 

‘“Well, thank you, well!’’ 

‘*You old crook, you!’’ aside in English. 

The greetings were long and inclusive: then I 
read off the amounts I had passed to him. His 
face, which had been all smiles, set. He didn’t say 
a word for several minutes, during which I went 
quietly on with my work. Then he asked me again. 
I repeated my statement, and he repeated his stolid 
wait. What went on in his mind, I think not even 
Heaven knew. Then, slowly at first, but with in- 
creasing rapidity, his remonstrance began. He 
shook his head, he stamped his foot, he grew an- 
grier and angrier. In the first two or three in- 
terviews I could feel my spine turning into an 
icicle. After the opening words he became unin- 
telligible and his expression alone conveyed his 
meaning. When I was thoroughly alarmed (or, at 
a later date, equally bored), I sought escape. 
There were three avenues. First, I could let 
him talk himself out, which took hours. Or I pro- 


80 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


duced a few maps, sometimes of his working place, 
sometimes not, and explained carefully what meas- 
urements I had made. It was all incomprehensible 
to him, but he felt the importance of being taken 
into my confidence and occasionally said it was all 
right—to cover up his ignorance, which he would 
not for a minute have admitted. And finally, when 
even this failed, I dug up the magic formula which 
solved all difficulties, ‘‘Habla con el mayordomo!”’ 
(‘Tell it to the foreman!’’) 

The foreman didn’t have to use the diplomacy 
that I did, and kept him waiting half an hour, to 
advise him finally to ‘‘Tell it to the engineer.’’ (I 
am assuming that Rios had no real grievance—and 
we took the utmost precautions to be sure.) After 
he had gone back and forth two or three times, either 
the foreman or I told him to go to hell, and he 
would then depart, homming softly, perfectly satis- 
fied that he had treated himself as well as possible 
and that there was nothing further to be gained. 

But in the beginning, when I found that I had to 
repeat this comedy with three or four contratistas 
every day, each of whom showed every symptom of 
being about to commit murder, I admit I formed 
rather a harsh opinion of the men with whom I 
was dealing. It took me some time to understand 
the Mexican even a little and to realize that the 
performance was a well-established custom, almost 


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THE DAY SHIFT GOES DOWN 
Loading Mexicans in mine cages to be dropped to their working places 





THE BATTLE-SCARRED MOUNTAIN-SIDE 
Glory Holes seen from the trail down to the mine 


I TAKE OVER DIVISION ONE 81 


a religious rite. Of course every man did not be- 
have quite so badly, but I found that when one did, 
I could not at once tell him to evaporate, and back 
my command up, as would be necessary, with force, 
because such a procedure would indelibly stamp on 
his mind the impression that I had something to 
conceal; he would never quite forget it. 

One must treat the Mexican with tact and make 
certain allowances. Mexico is not a prohibition 
country, but its people have all the inordinate de- 
sire for strong spirits that brought on the Volstead 
Act. They are not wine-drinkers, and they care ) 
nothing for to-morrow. The proof of the pudding 
is in an interesting bit of statistics. The production 
of the mine had to be constant to keep the mill run- 
ning smoothly and the management counted on a 
working production requiring about a thousand men 
at work each day. But to keep a thousand men 
busy underground, they had to carry twelve hundred 
on the pay-roll. Every day in the year one man out 
of every five was off drunk, or recovering! The only 
people. I have ever seen who could equal the men 
at Monte, for serious drinking, are the post-war 
American tourists in EKurope. 


CHAPTER V 
‘Cnn LA MINA’? 


WAS quite familiar with life underground be- 
fore I went to Mexico; my apprenticeship had 
been long and arduous. I was used to an existence 
which called for the donning of muddy armor and 
a daily adventure into another world. I suppose 
most people have a vague longing to lead a double 
life, and the mining industry gives one a wonderful 
opportunity to gratify such a desire. What greater 
contrast could one ask for: civilization with all its 
refinements, life in the bright sunlight, against the 
sternest of battles with the roughest side of nature, 
fought in the everlasting darkness of the inside of 
the world—and all within a few seconds’ ride in an 
iron cage. 

Mechanically, one enters the mine at Monte in a 
commonplace enough way for a miner. The shaft is 
a vertical hole in the ground, about ten by twenty- 
five feet. It is framed with timber and has guides 
for three cages: two five-by-five man hoists, double- 
deck affairs which fly up and down with lightning 


speed, and one big elevator for lowering supplies. 
82 


“EN LA MINA” 83 


I never knew why it was, but this monster, a steel 
box a dozen feet square, seemed to draw upon itself 
more than its share of casualties. 

The first two men I had ever seen killed in a 
mine, were killed in this elevator. They had been 
taking down long timbers the length of which had 
necessitated raising the bonnet on the top of the 
cage, a sort of folding roof. When their timbers 
were unloaded below, with characteristic thought- 
lessness they neglected to close the top over them; 
they got aboard and gave the signal to hoist. The 
cage leaped up, pulled by the great electric drums 
on top, the open side of the roof caught the timbers 
in the shaft, and before the engineer above noticed 
the increased load on his motors the loose bonnet 
had pulled a hundred feet of timbering into the 
cage, and trapped the occupants. They were found 
mangled beyond recognition. The terrific power of 
the hoist, which had been their guarantee of safety, 
had, through their own carelessness, brought their 
world in on top of them. 

Once, when I was going down in this cage, we 
had a very bad five minutes, being threatened with 
cremation. The signals to the engineer above can 
be given only by means of electric annunciators and 
cords at the stations, and once he has moved the 
cage from a landing-place he is out of touch with 
its occupants until he lands them where the last 


— 


84 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


signal directed. One morning, bound for the very 
bottom of the mine, I got on at the surface with 


‘ two native mechanics who were going down to adjust 


one of the electric locomotives. One of them had a 
barrel of cotton waste with him, which he deposited 
in the middle of the cage. The cage-tender gave 
the signal and down we dropped, but hardly had 
we lost the last gleam of sunlight when one of the 
mechanics, unused to the mine, struck a match to 
light his lamp. On cages this is strictly forbidden, 
and I don’t think he will ever do it again. His 
match caught the gas from his lamp, and this, blaz- 
ing up, set fire to the cotton waste. Half soaked 
with oil, it burst into a pillar of flame, in the midst 
of us, and before any one in the cage could move, 
burst the barrel and spread out into a terrifying 
bonfire. All this with the cage dropping silently 
into the earth, and four of us locked in that iron 
stove with no way to get out or to summon aid. 
Moreover, the big cage has not the sprightly speed 
of its smaller brothers and goes slowly on its way; 
there was a good five minutes ahead of us, long 
enough to finish us all completely. 

Our salvation (which the reader must have 
guessed because I am here to tell the story) came 
through no earthly hand. A big sheet of iron, five 
or six feet square, was leaning up against one side 
of the cage, and suddenly this fell with a crash, 


“EN LA MINA” 85 


across half the fire! I was crouched, petrified by 
the suddenness of the whole thing, in a far corner. 
I don’t think the Mexicans even knew they were 
alive, they were so frightened. The thing was over 
in a second; the remainder of the fire was harmless 
in itself and flickered out a minute later. However, 
when we pulled up at the bottom of the shaft, the 
air in the cage was chokingly thick and the tem- 
perature almost unbearable. 

In the morning these cages are loaded with an 
efficiency that would make the subway officials of 
Manhattan look upon their own life-work as a dismal 
failure. At the seven-o’clock siren the gates open 
and the men rush forward, anxious to be under- 
ground where they can rest in peace. Entering one © 
of the small cages, the first man places himself in 
the corner with his face to the wall, like a naughty 
child, and the others pack in, animated sardines, ten 
or twelve souls in the little five-by-five box. The 
gates are slammed and the other deck of the thing 
loaded. Then, at a second signal, the cage is dropped 
into the earth. I always used to think how much 
pleasanter it would be if one could just jump into 
the empty shaft with a parachute and float softly 
down. But, then, I suppose one would have to have 
a balloon waiting at the bottom, in order to get back 
to the surface. 

It usually took the best part of half an hour to 


eat Tone 


86 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


get five hundred men underground. One of the 
bones of contention in the American union camps is 
whether a shift should go down on its own time or 
the company’s. In Arizona the famous ‘‘collar-to- 
collar’’ law requires that men may be kept under- 
ground only eight hours, the time being taken from 
the collar of the shaft going down to the same point 
coming up. It really cuts an hour off the working 
time, right at the beginning, and with another half- 
hour at the company’s expense, for lunch, brings the 
miner’s shift very near the much-discussed six-hour 
day. 

As I have said, I was quite familiar with this 
routine long before I went to Mexico. But under- 
ground, the human touch of another race at once 
began to make itself felt. Step off the cage at a 
level station in the United States and the first thing 
that meets the eye will probably be a safety-first 
sign. In Mexico, side by side with such warnings, 
are little shrines—elaborate crosses decked with 
faded wreaths of flowers; a crudely modeled Christ 
crucified, or a grotesque representation of the Vir- 
gin Mary; a series of small crosses with a large 
one in the middle and perhaps a lighted candle or 
two. 

In southern Mexico, where the Church is domi- 
nant, the underground shrines are very elaborate. 
The miner, going in to work, always stops and 


“EN LA MINA” 87 


crosses himself in the thorough Mexican manner. 
In Monte, where American influence has made itself 
felt, the faith is not quite so strong. There are 
shrines at every station, but they are dirty and 
neglected and an abbreviated genuflection in passing 
is their portion of respect. However, if the people 
here have lost their faith, they have not gained any 
appreciable caution to replace it. The fatalistic at- 
titude of the race still maintains: one will die when 
one will die, obviously not before; and that is the 
last word that can be said. Once their hearts had 
begun to beat again, the mechanics of the cage epi- 
sode took the whole thing as a matter of course. 
What impressed them was not the danger of such | 
asinine carelessness but the fact that that was not | 
their day to die. 

Fortunately, the Americans cannot take this at- 
titude, even officially. Killing and injuring men is 
an expensive amusement under modern laws in rad- 
ical Mexico, I was told. It costs five thousand pesos 
to kill a man; and his widow, if he has one, must be 
supported. Moreover, if this lady has the desire to 
travel, she may take her family, which in the cir- 
cumstances assumes gigantic proportions, and go to 
Mexico City at the company’s expense. The reason 
for this ruling is a little obscure, but must come 
from solicitude on the part of the Government, for 
the widow’s mental ease. Certainly, to be in the 


88 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


crowded city, hundreds of miles from home, with 
only a meager pension to live on, can do her no 
physical good, so that it must be for her mind’s 
sake she is allowed to go. At least the problems of 
metropolitan life, as depicted in the cinema, will 
take her thoughts off her deceased husband. 

To save the capital from such invasions, and per- 
haps from some consideration of the company’s 
(capital as well, every possible safety-device is used. 
iThere was an American in charge of the safety- 
department at Monte. He was a youngish man with 
a quiet manner and gray hair. After three or four 
beers he used to tell, to whatever audience was 
assembled, the story of how his hair had turned. 

When he was still in his twenties he was safety- 
inspector in a big caving-system mine in the States. 
An entire mountain had been opened below, with a 
view to letting it cave of its own weight, when it 
took matters into its own hands and without warning 
dropped the five feet it was undercut. A few of 
the drifts, heavily bulkheaded against just such an 
emergency, remained open, and the shift at work 
escaped. But the count was not exact, and the in- 
spector went back into the mine to make sure all 
the men were safe. He entered a tunnel and had 
walked half a mile in, when it caved behind him. 
Terrified, he ran on, only to be confronted twenty 
feet farther along by another cave-in. He was 


“EN LA MINA” 89 


trapped in a little space twenty or thirty feet long, 
completely isolated. There was nothing to do, so 
he relit his lamp, which the blasts of air from the 
first cave-in had extinguished, and sat down and 
waited. Soon he noticed that the roof over his head 
was settling. It came down, inch by inch, timber and 
all, gradually closing the little space that was left 
him. For six hours he sat and watched it come down 
on him. After one hour he could not stand; after 
three, he measured the roof at four feet above the 
floor. At the end of six hours it appeared to stop, 
just two and a half feet above the ground! 

To le in a hole two and a half feet in height and 
wait for the end to come, is one of the most hideous 
situations I can imagine. The inspector admitted 
he should have known that once the motion had 
stopped he was safe, because it meant that the 
ground had arched over him and was firm, but he 
said he was too far gone for anything to make an im- 
pression. The ground was cracked, and plenty of air 
came to him, but he lay there while his lamp burnt 

out, all through the night and the next day. At 
the end of thirty-six hours, the rescue crew, work- 
ing day and night to get to him, made the connection 
and pulled him out. 


; He felt fine, and went home with his wife and ate 


-a good dinner. It was not until a week later that 
the memory of his experience began to break him. 


90 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


He found he could n’t sleep for imagining the ceil- 
ing creeping down on him, and he would get up and 
go down town to buy a bottle of whisky, and then 
go off into the hills, alone, to drink it. He finally 
had to leave camp for a while, but before that, he 
told us, little by little his hair had turned, first 
gray, then, here and there in patches, white. I won- 
dered, but did not ask him, whether or not the 
whisky had anything to do with it. 

That man knew more gruesome tales and hor- 
rible statistics than any individual I have ever 
met. Two of his statements I remember as interest- 
ing. One of these was that men falling more than 
a thousand feet were always found with their shoes 
off. I do not know how many shaft accidents he 
had inspected, but he asserted that in every case 
the men were found without their shoes. He told 
us that upon one occasion an iron bucket full of 
men was setting out to the bottom of one of the 
deepest shafts in the United States, over five thou- 
sand feet in depth, when the cable broke. The wife 
of one of the miners in it was handing her husband 
his dinner-pail, and their hands were touching. The 
bucket fell the whole distance. When men went 
down to bring up the remains, not one of the bodies 
had a shoe on: leather fragments were found all the 
way up and down the shaft, with broken laces, 
caught in the timber. I have taken part in many 


“EN LA MINA” 91 


discussions of the reason for this extraordinary 
fact, and heard innumerable theories advanced, but 
the most probable seems that swelling of the feet 
breaks the laces and that then the shoes are knocked 
off as the falling bodies strike against the walls; or 
they may be pulled away by the rush of wind. 

The other statement the inspector made was that 
when a man was turning over a car to dump the con- 
tents into a chute, if the car itself fell in, he would 
never let go but would hang on and follow it down to 
destruction. This is more natural, because at the 
first thrill of danger—the whole thing happening 
too fast for him to think—the man tightens his grip 
on the first thing he can lay his hands on, and that is 
the car. And the more terrified he becomes, the 
tighter will he hold to that vehicle which, if it has 
far to fall, proves to be a chariot of death. 

I am afraid this is becoming a gruesome chapter, 
but I do not mean it to be. Life underground is not 
a gruesome thing: it is weird and different, but it is 
still intensely human, and human life is not essen- 
tially gruesome. Perhaps, though, it is a little more 
exciting than most lives, and the high points more 
dramatic. Often, with the irony of existence, the 

most horrible incidents become the most ludicrous. 

For instance, deaths underground lead to ex- 

traordinary complications. There is a law in Mexico 
that if a man is killed below the surface, his body 


92 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


must be left until the officials of the town come down 
and make an inspection. There used to be all sorts 
of mix-ups in consequence. For example: a man 
was working around a chute and fell in. One of the 
regulations was that every chute must be covered 
with what is called a ‘‘grizzly’’—that is, a grating 
of iron or heavy timber to let rocks pass only up to 
a certain limit in size, and to protect men from their 
own carelessness. The grizzly on this particular 
chute was very heavy, made of twelve-by-twelve 
timber spaced just thirteen inches apart. The man 
was alone and no one knew how he did it, but he fell 
through the thirteen inches into the hole. It was 
sixty feet deep, with broken rock at the bottom. He 
must have lain there some time, because no one 
missed him until another miner, coming up a man- 
way by the chute, heard his groans. 

The alarm was given, the first-aid and rescue 
crews hastened down, together with all the American 
officials of the mine, including myself. The hole in 
the grizzly, through which he had fallen, was so 
small that it was impossible to get the wire basket, 
used in mine rescue, through the opening, and the 
only thing left to do was to draw the ore in the chute 
out from under him. Ore-cars were run up under 
the chute gate and the rock pulled slowly out, letting 
the injured man down on top of it. We drew out 
four car-loads, and finally the man’s foot appeared 


“EN LA MINA” 93 


in the gate. We took hold, and worked him out. 
He was in his death-agony, and just as he slid out 

he gave a little shiver and died. 
Now what was to be done? The man was dead; 
but he had died just as we were taking him out. It 
was obviously of no use to leave him there. Besides, 
_where he was, he blocked all the work on the level. 
The superintendents made their decision and we 
took him on top. Unfortunately, the chief went back 
to his, office. In ten minutes an armed delegation 
ealled on him and escorted him to the carcel (the 
jail). They also nabbed the inspector and looked 
for the foreman and me, but, luckily for us, we had 
stayed underground. They finally settled the affair, 
but not before it had degenerated into a farce, with 
all the Americans taking to cover and the young 
bloods of the police force having a grand man-hunt. 
_As no one knew clearly what it was all about, no one 
| realized that the chief and the inspector had been 
_arrested for violation of the law, and the two had to 
dodge rats and vermin in the local cooler all night. 

But, despite all this, I have always liked life un- 
-derground. When I was a miner in Arizona I used 
to get a thrill out of being ‘‘on the firing line”’ that 
convinced my friends in New York, when I tried to 
explain it to them, of my blood brotherhood with 
Eugene O’Neil’s ‘‘Hairy Ape.’’ I liked to feel that 
I was at the top of the social system. Here I was 


94 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


breaking rock in the center of the earth. A million- 
dollar plant above had been built to compress air 
for me to use in my machine. There was a crew of 
men who had no other occupation than to string the 
pipes and hoses that brought it to me. The first 
thing in the morning the little ‘‘tool-nipper,’”’ a 
fifteen-year-old boy, dashed down ahead of me to 
bring sharp steel into my stope, that there might be 
nothing to delay my work. When I wanted to blast, 
I called down and a ‘‘powder-monkey”’ ran to fetch 
me my dynamite. There were two men below em- 
ployed by the company (representing the world at 
large) to muck away the rock that I broke. Behind 
them waited an army to handle it—hand-trammers 
to take it to the motor-pockets, locomotive engineers 
on electric dinkies, with long trains, to pull it to the 
shaft; great hoists to lift it up; and, beyond them, 
huge mills whose costs ran into millions, and thou- 
sands of miles of railroad tracks to speed the metal 
on to where the world waited for it. And I was the 
man that started it all! It is worth living to be able 
to feel like that. Life was never dull as long as I 
had such an attitude. 

Speaking of life never being dull reminds me of 
an incident of the Mexican race-track that furnished 
me a motto I have never forgotten. In a ranch in 
Sonora they used to hold informal horse-races, and 
on the day of a big event the jockey of the favorite 


“EN LA MINA” 95 


fell ill. There seemed to be nobody in camp capable 
of riding his horse, until the cook announced that in 
his youth he had taken many a winner across the 
line. Now, it happened that this cook was the most 
unpopular man in camp. Both his tongue and his 
‘seasoning were a little too sharp for the ranchers’ 
taste. But there was heavy betting on the horse, and 
_an exhibition convinced them that the ex-jockey-cook 
‘knew his business. So they put him up. 

_ The race was a terrific one, but in the last half- 
mile the favorite took a head’s lead and was coming 
| down the track like a tornado, when suddenly an un- 





foreseen catastrophe took place. They were racing 
on the desert, and the favorite stepped in a gopher- 
hole and fell, fell and broke its leg. When the crowd 
rushed up, both horse and rider lay apparently dead. 
A group of cow-boys from the cook’s ranch, all of 
whom had bet heavily on the horse, took command of 
the situation. They were old-timers and not given 
to display of emotion. They looked at the cook’s 
prostrate form and called for pick and shovel. When 
these implements arrived, the men went to the spot 
on which the horse had fallen, and around the 
gopher-hole they dug a grave. They even carried 
the body over and laid it by the side of the excava- 
tion at which they were working. 

- When the grave was two feet deep, and the men 
were picking away in it furiously, a strange thing 


| 
if 


96 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


happened: the corpse sat up. And as he sat up he 
turned about and his feet sank into the hole that had 
been dug. The grave-diggers paused in their work 
and scratched their heads. A look of dismay went 
around: the hated man had simply been stunned (it 
can only be surmised whether or not they had sus- 
pected as much; at least they had taken no steps to 
verify any belief they might have had). The little 
jockey-cook looked at them, at the crowd behind 
them, and at the grave in which his feet hung. And 
he shook his head as he said very slowly: ‘‘Wall, 
life may be checkered, but—Gawd!—it ain’t never 
dull!’’ 

Which is rather a good way of summing up life in 
a mine, as well as that of the race-track. To carry 
the comparison farther: one is continually coming 
to with one’s feet in the grave and a hopeful group 
about, waiting to see one buried. 

Salomon and I had a number of pleasant little ex- 
cursions to the edge of the great unknown. Climb- 
ing about, it was necessary to be a good deal of an 
acrobat and more of a monkey, and to carry a 
rabbit’s foot always. The worst places were the 
raises. In Monte they drove what were called 
‘‘bean-hole’’ connections between levels, five-by- 
seven shafts up through the rock, without timbering. 
As the miner worked up, he wedged posts across the 
raise and, standing on these, drilled over his head. 


uleyUNoU 9t} 
9oyO VUIUL 94} JO yuo, UL Sururou Auy dn driz 94} Jo asv4s 4Jsvp 9y} ST AVAIVI OUT[OUL ey, 


LAGALS GNOOAS-ALYOR OL TONAAV Hid dO DNIWOO NGHAVOH OL LNAHOSV GHG 





“EN LA MINA” 97 


But when he came to blast these holes, the terrific 
force of the falling rock usually carried everything 
down before it. Ladders and other modern con- 
veniences were impossible, and entrance into the 
raise, the day after blasting, was up a rope which one 
had no guarantee was not half shot in two at the top. 
Moreover, drilling with water to lay the dust kept 
these ropes impregnated with slime and as slippery 
as a greased pole. And yet, climbing up and down 
and hauling the heavy drilling-machine up after 
them, the miners drive five feet a day up into the 
rock! 

Once a week I had to measure all these openings. 
If it could be so arranged, usually Salomon went up 
and I waited below, under cover from the rain of 
rocks which would follow his ascent. He was a little 
nervous at first, but I think I changed his entire at- 
titude by a rather tactless but timely remark the 
second week we went down. I had been studying my 
Spanish lesson the night before, and was trying to 
memorize a few phrases from the copy-book. One 
that stuck in my mind was “‘gTiene la valor hacer- 
le?’’ which means ‘‘ Have you the courage to do it?’’ 
or, more colloquially, ‘‘Have you nerve enough?’’ 
We were to measure a particularly mean raise down 
which small rocks were continually falling and Salo- 
mon was frightened. Two or three times I told him 
to go up, and then the phrase popped into my head, 


98 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


and I said with great scorn, ‘‘;No tvene la valor?’’ 
The resultant emotions registered on Salomon’s face 
were not pleasant to witness. He appeared to be 
undecided whether to murder me at once or to climb 
the rope first and murder me afterward. Luckily, 
he chose the rope, and the climb took the murder out 
of him. From that day on he never hesitated. 
About half the time I had to go up with him, and 
on one occasion he saved my life very neatly and 
made me feel ashamed of my initial insult, which I 
am sure he never quite forgot. We had to ascend a 
raise of eighty feet, the rope into which was secured 
at the bottom and passed up, through a pulley at the 
top, and down again. We had both made the ascent 
up the free end satisfactorily and finished our work 
of setting plugs in the walls for directions for the 
miner, and I started down. When I got half-way, 
some perverse devil loosened the end of the rope 
below. I bounced once against the wall, my light 
went out, and my heart tried to escape through my 
windpipe. My former life did what it could to pass 
in review before me, and I held to that rope as I 
hope never to have to hold to anything again. Then 
there was a scream from above, Salomon’s lamp, a 
flaming rocket, came hurtling down, and the rope 
grew taut. My arms were almost pulled out of the 
sockets, and I hit heavily against the wall again, but 
I was safe. Salomon had seen the rope jump and 


“EN LA MINA” 99 


had thrown himself on the free end and balanced my 
weight. Doing it, he had been drawn up into the 
pulley and narrowly escaped losing both hands, 
which might easily have been squashed in the wheel, 
but he had saved my life. He took a hitch in the 
block, and I slid down the forty feet below me in the 
dark. And, when he had gotten himself together, 
Salomon followed. 

Salomon was a queer chap when confronted with 
danger: one never knew whether he was going to be 
exceptionally brave and possessed of a presence of 
mind the above suggests, or supremely ridiculous. 
Once, when I was in a hurry, I climbed from one 
level to another, down one of the main manways in 
the mine. It was equipped with fifteen-foot ladders 
with a landing between each two, and was used as a 
through route for the power-cables and water-mains 
as well as a human highway. In my descent I no- 
ticed that the ladders were wet from some leak 
above, and here and there as I went down I felt a 
tremor under my hand. It happened that just as I 
had reached the level I was bound for, Salomon fol- 
lowing, I got wedged in a narrow place and knocked 
my note-book out of my pocket. It fell the fifteen 
feet to the next landing below, and I told the boy to 
climb down and bring it up tome. He started obedi- 
ently down the ladder, descended three rungs, and 
gave the most blood-curdling scream, at the same 


100 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


time throwing himself backward off the ladder. 
Lighting on the landing, he crouched, trembling, 
against the wall, swearing in a horrible, distracted 
way until I feared he had gone mad and went down 
after him. 

When I reached the third rung, I discovered the 
trouble. The minute my hand touched it, I felt a 
good stiff electric shock run through me; the electric 
cable had grounded against the wet ladder and was 
doing effective guard duty. I remembered some ad- 
vice an electrician had once given me, and I took a 
firm grip and went on down; it was nothing to knock 
aman out. But my helper, at the bottom, was com- 
pletely demoralized. Even my re-ascent did not re- 
assure him: he said my body was big enough to ab- 
sorb the current, but that it tore his bones apart. 
Ten minutes of persuading got him to touch the 
ladder gingerly, but of course his light touch on the 
charged object gave an infinitely greater shock than 
a firm grip would have, and his return engagement 
with the ladder finished him. He climbed down the 
ninety feet to the next level and walked a mile out 
to the shaft to get back up to me, and for the rest of 
the week (whenever hard work was suggested) 
stated that he was incapable of physical exertion, so 
horribly had the current ‘‘racked’’ him. 

As in the case of the electric shock he believed me 


“EN LA MINA” 101 


protected by my size, he was always accounting for 
any peculiarity of mine by my height. He got a tre- 
mendous ‘‘kick’’ out of my six feet two. Surveying 
stations or points underground are all plugs set in 
the roof, usually about eight feet above the floor, and 
it was a source of endless amusement not only to 
Salomon but to every Mexican lucky enough to be in 
the vicinity to see me reach up to hang a plumb-bob 
from one. The men would gather from every direc- 
tion and stand about howling with delight. What is 
essentially humorous in being able to reach a foot 
higher than one’s fellow-men, I haven’t yet been 
able to ascertain, but the men were always joking 
about it, telling me how fortunate I should be in case 
of a flood, because I should be the last man to drown, 
and declaring that if I fell down in the middle of the 
mine I should assuredly land with my head out at 
the shaft! | 


The psychology of life underground always re- 
minded me of the psychology of life overseas during 
the war. An organization of men, trained and under 
discipline, fights face to face with death. If the in- 
dividual thinks about the fact, has it on his mind, he 
will make a sorry miner or soldier; but, on the other 
hand, if he completely ignores it, his career will be 
lamentably short. The result is an assumption of it 


102 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


without a consciousness. But unconsciously a mo- 
rale, an esprit de corps is created which makes for a 
sort of fellowship. 

It was this spirit that built up a remarkable psy- 
chological safety-system in a mine in which I once 
worked, where there was no safety-first department 
whatever. The camp was second-generation Cor- 
nish, the kind of place where fathers brought their 
sons underground with them when the boys reached 
the age of fourteen, and taught them the trade. We 
were quartz-gold mining, using virtually no timber 
to hold up the ground, and the work might have 
been very dangerous, but the generations of 
workers, sprung from a long line of tin-miners of 
Cornwall, had adopted an attitude all their own. In 
Arizona a careless man is ridden by the bosses; in 
Mexico, if he is too bad, he is discharged; in this 
Cornish mine he was simply laughed at! 

Carry dynamite and caps in the same box and no 
one would reprimand, but the luckless soul who did 
it would be known from then on as a ‘‘damned fool.”’ 
No one would talk seriously with him; no one would 
talk to him at all who could help it; everybody would 
just laugh at him. He would work alone, he would 
eat alone, he would be in none of the little jokes 
about the mine. It does not take long for such treat- 
ment to make an impression on even the stupidest 
man. Without the little fellowship possible, life in 


“EN LA MINA” 103 


a mine is hell; the man who is thus ostracized, if he 
remains in the work at all, will soon mend his ways. 

I suggested trying to create such a morale at 
Monte, and the inspector liked the idea, but it was 
very different where the spirit of bravado was so 
strong. For example, I was once surveying near a 
chute-gate which was leaking badly and raining 
boulders across the drift it opened on—a very dan- 
gerous place indeed. A chute-tender was standing 
there, himself in a perilous position, when an in- 
spector came by. The chutero told him to look out, 
which the inspector did with alacrity, for one flying 
piece came within an inch of his head. He promptly 
went around another way to the stope above and told 
the miner a good deal about his ancestors and where 
he himself would be if he didn’t fix that chute. 
When he had gone, the chutero dashed up the ladder 
to the stope, and I heard him apologizing, with tears 
in his voice, for having given the miner away. 

‘Comrade, comrade, I am sorry! I did not know 
he was an inspector or I would have kept my mouth 
shut!’’ 

One of the many rules the inspectors made for 
protecting the men was one against blasting in the 
middle of a shift, and it was in connection with a 
disregard of this rule that I experienced what I con- 
sider the world’s narrowest escape. I cannot wholly 
understand it yet. I was walking down a drift, my 


104 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


man Friday at my heels as usual, when we came to 
a place where the side of the drift had been cut back 
twenty or more feet to start a stope. There was no 
reason why I should have been cautious; it was ten 
in the morning, and there was no danger-signal in 
the drift. I remember I was whistling softly to my- 
self, thinking of nothing in particular, when without 
warning, as I came abreast of this opening, a quick 
flash of flame shot out of the darkness at my right, 
with the report of a pistol. 

Now, mine noises are peculiar; they are not like 
any other noises—are, in fact, so different that one 
has to become acquainted with them before they can 
be interpreted. A green man underground will be 
terrified by the passing of a train, its thunder echo- 
ing through the rock, and think nothing of the little 


squeaks a timber gives just before it breaks. One — 


gets so that in the midst of the most awful din of 
roaring drills and falling ore one can detect the 
minutest sounds of warning in the ground. 

All these noises, harmless or fraught with peril, 
become familiar and have a specific reaction con- 
nected with them. It is the unexpected that petri- 
fies. That report like a pistol was totally unlike 
anything I had ever before heard underground. It 
froze me in my tracks, in the middle of a step, half 
turned toward the spot whence the flame had come. 
It stopped Salomon, too. The light from our lamps 


og 


“EN LA MINA” 105 


lost itself in gloom a few yards away. There was 
nothing but a circle of light before us, and silence. 
Then—crack!/—a second report, a blast of wind, and 
the snap of pebbles hitting the wall about us. Both 
our lights were out, and terror, stark naked, had my 
heart in a vise. I could not have moved if the doors 
of heaven had opened at my side. I did not know 
that they were open at that moment. 

In a blank, meaningless eternity of time, four 
more reports came, one after another, each with its 
blast of wind and its rain of rock. Then only silence 
and darkness. I don’t know how long we stood 
there, but I know that neither of us made a move to 
relight his lamp until another light came out of the 
unknown and approached us. Carrying the light 
was the miner of the stope. When he saw us he 
turned ghastly white over his own lamp and began 
crossing’ himself. Then we snapped out of it, and 
I found what had happened. We had stood in the 
face of six holes loaded with dynamite, and watched 
all six of them, twenty feet away, blow out! If any 
one of them had done what it was supposed to do, 
had the dynamite gone off as well as the cap and 
broken the rock about it, both of us should have been 
killed instantly, battered to pieces. 

The chances of the first hole going off were about 
twenty to one. According to the science of blasting, 
the first shot should have broken the burden of rock, 


106 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


and the other five broken the ground into the cut the 
first made. The first having missed, the likelihood 
of the rest breaking was less, but still horribly 
threatening. I figured that the chances of the six 
holes all missing were at least one in a hundred— 
probably more. If the miner had been experienced 
and loaded them correctly, there would have been 
no chance at all. But if he had, I suppose he would 
have known enough to guard the drift down which 
we came, so no one knows how it would have worked 
out. At any rate, that was the closest I have ever 
come to eternity, and I ’ll admit it took a good many 
beers in the afternoon to quiet my nerves enough to 
allow me to eat my dinner and sleep on it. 
Speaking of dinner brings me to another differ- 
ence between the American and the Mexican miner. 
They certainly appreciated their food, those Mexi- 
cans! When I worked underground in Arizona, we 
used to carry our lunches down in paper bags, and 
hang them by strings from timbers, to protect them 
from the rats until it was time for us to snatch our 
meal in the half-hour allowed. No such silly haste 
_and cold food for the Mexican! The lunch system 
| 1s very highly developed. In the first place, the men 
‘take a good hour; and, in the second, they have hot 
\food sent down to them. The company builds big 
trucks fitted with shelves, one for each level, with a 
large label on each—‘‘1200,’’ ‘‘1300,’’ ‘1400,’ and 


“EN LA MINA” 107 


soon. At eleven-thirty these are parked outside the 
gates of the shaft inclosure, and the wives and chil- 
dren of the miners rush up with tins of hot food and 
load them on the truck for the level their breadwin- 
ners are working on. The tins are usually made of 
old lard-pails, stacked one inside another, like a 
pile of flower-pots. Each layer contains a different 
dish, the first course on top, coffee and cigars in the 
bottom—I presume. (I never carried one.) 

When the trucks are loaded, they are hurried into 
the shaft and lowered to the respective levels. In 
each station a lunch club meets and for an hour toys 
with home-made delicacies and conversation. The 
more exclusive contratistas send one of their helpers 
out to meet the dining-car and have their dinner 
brought in to the stope, where they eat in feudal 
arrogance, seated on a rock, with their knights 
grouped at their feet. 

I have seen the super-luxury of wine with lunch, 
but its consumption is not encouraged by the 
authorities. Alcohol and safety-first do not mix. I 
speak from experience. We had a big dinner one 
Sunday evening, after a tennis tournament, and as 
there were sixteen entries all of whose toasts must 
be drunk ‘‘bottoms up,’’ a marvelous time was had 
by all. My foreman was ‘‘on the wagon.’’ Like 
most people in this lamentable condition, he was 
slightly unappreciative of the jollity, and perhaps he 


108 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


resented some of the innocent jests at his expense. 
Be that as it may, at seven o’clock the next morning 
he came into the engineers’ office and announced that 
he wanted me to make a complete inspection under- 
ground with him. 

My self-assertion was slightly below par that 
morning, and I followed the foreman meekly. I 
don’t know whether or not I have mentioned it, but — 
the temperature in the mine was between eighty 
and ninety in most places, and the air was close, 
with the dank smell of underground workings. The 
morning was a highly unpleasant one. I went down 
the drifts, bouncing against the wall on each side and 
falling into the drainage ditches about every ten 
feet, and in each working place Mr. Stewart would 
sit down and add insult to injury. He would take 
two or three long breaths and exclaim: ‘‘Gad! I feel 
fine! Nothing like exercise in the morning!’’ and 
then, having received a malevolent look from me, 
‘‘Tell me, old man: was it really worth it?’’ The 
only shred of manhood I had left went into answer- 
ing him, ‘‘Yes, it was worth every ounce of it!’’ I 
don’t know why lying should have given me so much 
satisfaction, but I felt that to weaken would be to 
lose all. 

The Mexicans have a charming word, crudo, which 
in its inclusive sense denotes all the after effects of 


“EN LA MINA”? | 109 


having sipped too freely: hangover, headache, dis- 
position, tendency to morning-after reform, and 
one’s attitude toward one’s wife—all in one. I have 
no doubt the demand for such a word was so great 
that it was coined to fill the need, but it is the most 
soul-satisfying expression I know. 


When one is in the humor to appreciate it, a mine 
is really a very beautiful thing. I have often wished 
I had some knack with pencil or brush, that I might 
portray the picturesque beauty of light and shadow 
below the surface. The naked men—their brown 
skin glistening in the lamplight, their bodies liter- 
ally rippling with muscles—swinging a hammer or 
an ax with great powerful strokes; a man fighting a 
drill, seen behind a cloud of fog the wet exhaust of 
compressed air throws about him, the long, radiat- 
ing fingers of light feeling their way through the 
mist; the little engineer crouched on the humped 
back of his electric mine locomotive, flying down the 
tunnel, the headlight of the machine playing with the 
twists of glistening rail before him. 

And the mystery of it all! A light passes, a hun- 
dred feet down the drift. It is carried by a man, 
but you cannot see him: who is this gnome wander- 
ing in and out through the earth? The young Irish- 
American engineer who broke me in used to call 


110 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


such apparitions ‘‘ships that pass in the night,’’ and 
some Celtic love of romance came out in him, for he 
used to say to me: 

“‘To be able to see things like that—that ’s what 
counts. Ah, man! if it were n’t for such, I ’d never 
be wasting my life in the dark! The mystery of one 
light that comes and goes, and me not knowing who 
or what it is, means more to me than the pay-check. 
I can put whoever I like behind it, in my head, and 
no one ’s the wiser!’’ 

And, too, the Mexicans are always singing—curi- 
ous, monotonous tunes. Their voices have a quality 
that goes through one. I used to like to be below 
when the afternoon shift came up. The cages were 
loaded from the bottom levels first, and any one 
only a few hundred feet down could hear them com- 
ing up, by the wave of sound that preceded them. 
Each load began to sing as the gates shut, and the 
melody would float up the shaft-way, made even 
more unusual by the fact that the singers were ap- 
proaching with the speed of a train. The sound, 
first faint and soft, would grow, swelling in volume 
until, as the cage passed the level one was on, it 
would roll forth in one second of fortissimo and then 
sweep away as the chorus was whisked up over one’s 
head. There was a romance, a beauty in it all, stran- 
ger than anything that ever grew in the imagina- 
tion of Jules Verne. 


CHAPTER VI 
CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 


HEN a man has been working in close con- 
tact with other men for a certain number of 
hours a day, after which each goes his own way, he 
is, naturally, curious to know what his companions 
‘in arms do with the rest of the twenty-four hours. 
He knows that his own life is commonplace, but 
hopes to find romance in theirs—and if romance is 
not to be found, at least understanding. 
So, very early in my stay, I began to try to pene- 
trate the barrier of tradition and racial difference 
of which the four-o’clock whistle and subsequent 
parting of the ways daily reminded me. My entrée 
into the homes of the men was secured, at first, by 
my quest for a horse on which to spend my Sunday 
respite from mathematical calculations. I dis- 
covered that most of my contratistas owned mounts 
of some kind, and I used to trot down the hill in the 
evenings to exercise my vocabulary of a few dozen 
phrases (and my legs in the long climb back) to 
discuss their respective merits. 


The first thing that astonished me was to find the 
111 





112 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


miners still in their ‘‘digging clothes.’’ One’s imag- 
ination can give a fair idea of the condition of gar- 
ments worn all day by men working in stifling heat, 
and wet down at intervals by a pleasant mixture of 
oil, water, and mud. The American miner commg 
off shift spends fifteen minutes a day in the shower, 
with mechanic’s soap, and standing, one of a circle 
of men, scrubs his neighbor’s back. The black cut- 
tings from sulphide ore work into the skin and 
cover the driller with a dark coating which by com- 
parison makes a coal-heaver seem a brother to 
Phebe Snow. Machine-oil and incidental iron-rust. 
from the drills mix beautifully, forming a red-black 
paste which is most conveniently removed from 
one’s person by scrubbing the epidermis and dirt off 
together. And in addition to the entire range of 
human odors, ‘‘digging clothes’’ will pick up a stale 
smell of dead powder fumes and blend the whole 
into a revolting effluvium. Yet here I found one 
of my best contratistas, a man who had been mak- 
ing twenty dollars a day in gold, for two weeks, 
seated in front of his door, smoking his evening 
cigarette as calmly as possible, still arrayed in his 
uniform of toil. 

The first man I called on was a chap called ‘‘ Angel 
Solis,’? who had made himself fabulously rich 
—at least so I presumed from his pay-roll figures— 
by running two or three workings at once. He was 


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THE TOWN PUMP 
A typical side-street with the community well in the center hidden by shrubbery 





TRAFFIC PROBLEMS 
A burro train waits on the younger generation 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 113 


one of the very few who had the executive ability 
to operate his stopes at a profit without doing any 


manual labor himself; most contratistas worked with , 


their men to ‘‘make her pay.’’ When I first noticed 
the fortune he was making, I asked my foreman if 
such success was usual with him, and when I was 
told that it was, I said to myself, ‘‘ Well, here at 
least is one rich Mexican!’’ A man of ability, earn- 
ing much, he should have a model home. I finally 
ferreted out his house in a gully below camp, a little 
~ adobe building roofed over with what were evidently 
- ancient iron fire-doors from the mine, salvaged from 
some dump-heap. It had a chimney which consisted 
of half a dozen coffee cans telescoped one in another 
and raised itself proudly in a sort of haphazard 
spiral. There were one or two tiny windows, evi- 
dently built in, so dirty that one could not see 
through them, and a large opening in front which 
was the door. 
_ Angel greeted me from his seat by this portal and, 
knowing my errand, sent a dirty little urchin to fetch 
the steed I desired to see. Through the open door- 
way I inspected the house as we chatted, neither of 
us understanding a great deal of what the other was 
saying. The house was a one-room affair; in one 
— corner leaned a dissolute-looking iron bed, the tangle 
of blankets on it unmade. There was a sort of cot 
in another corner; a battered wash-stand, obviously 


= te od 


114 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


unused except as a repository for what belonged no- 
where else; and two heavy chests of drawers. The 
culinary department, a small stove piled with greasy 
pots and pans, had its station between the chests; 
and the dining-room equipment of a wooden table 
surrounded with tired-looking chairs completed the 
furnishings. The walls were decorated with yel- 
lowed cuts from American Sunday papers and 
bright-colored lithographs of vacant-looking deities 
with eyes raised to the cobwebbed under side of the 
iron roof as if fearful that that makeshift would 
come down on their worshipers. 

A circle like a miniature race-track had been 
swept (or kicked) clean around the center table, and 
the nakedness of the wooden floor in this ring shaded 
off into the accumulated dust and filth which covered 
the rest of the place. A fat, jolly-looking old girl 
was puffing around the stove, now wiping the strag- 
gling hair from her forehead with the back of her 
hand, now feeling dubiously at the string which cut 
into her ample middle and held together the great 
awnings that did service as clothing, cutting her 
in two so that she looked like a happy meal-bag that 
had been tied in the middle instead of at the top. 

Half a dozen children ran about, the happiness of - 
never having to wash their ears evidently coming 
out in their play, for they were having a glorious 
time. Two of the smallest—babies two or three 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 115 


years old—were in ecstasies of delight, wrestling 
with a little black pig under the dining-room table; 
another was engaged in teaching a mongrel puppy 
to pursue its own tail. Altogether, the picture cer- 
tainly was that of a happy family, but hardly of a 
prosperous one. 

When the horse finally appeared, it turned out to 
be a magnificent creature, ard from the interior of 
the house a boy brought out a beautiful saddle, 
ornamented with silver—the one evidence of Angel’s 
prosperity, but still hardly compensation for the 
squalor of his home. I made arrangements to try 
the horse the next Sunday, and wandered on. 

If the wealthy Angel lived like this, in what kind 
of shack did my poor Salomon exist, who lived solely 
on the dollar and a half with which he was daily 
rewarded for his faithfulness to me? I found him 
in one of the company-built houses half-way up the 
hill. Its interior was almost identical with that of 
Angel’s home! The only difference was that Salo- 
mon shared his castle with another family, and 
everything—children, wives, and dirt—was doubled. 
And the company houses were one-room shacks) 
about fifteen feet square! 

The attitude of big companies toward housing 
their men is very different in different localities. In 
the United States, the problem is difficult. If the 
company builds a model town, it can give the men 





116 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


infinitely better facilities, nearer the work and in 
every way more convenient. But no matter with 
what altruism such steps are taken, the cry of pa- 
ternalism goes up among the men, and one will find 
a large number who would rather live in shacks, 
miles from their jobs, and rented at exorbitant 
prices from individual landlords, than accept the 
advantages their employers offer, merely because 
they feel more independent paying their rent to 
some one other than the company. The question is 
a delicate one, and many solutions have been worked 
out and are being worked out. But in Mexico there 
is no such problem. The attitude of the larger com- 
\ panies is necessarily paternal; the people dealt with 
| are children and must be looked after and guarded, 
to insure any production whatever. 
There is, however, a wide variance in the attitude 
taken toward the so-called ‘‘elevation of the race.’’ 
, In southern Mexico no attempt is made to change 
the status of the peon laborer: he is taken for what 
| he is. He is fed and given money to buy alcohol, 
‘and his shortcomings are sworn at but accepted. 
Over the line, to the north, in camps that employ 
\nothing but Mexican labor, where a Mexican city is 
literally transplanted from its own soil to ours, sys- 
tematic attempts are made to raise the standard of 
living. I was told that it takes just four years to 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 117 


complete the Americanization of the Mexican—to 
teach him to bathe every day, to sleep in clean rooms 
with plenty of air, and to curb, in a measure, his 
ferocious appetite for spirits. Also itis an sist 
fact that the results are highly satisfactory, and that 
increased output goes hand in hand with physical} 
and mental improvement. 

I had a great many arguments, at Monte, about 
these policies. The company more or less straddled 
them. They built the men houses, but houses such 
as Salomon lived in were sorry improvements on the 
native ones. They tried to teach safety-first and 
gave medical service, but paid little or no attention 


to the living-conditions of the so-called healthy.~~ 


The first encounter with evidences of traditional in- 
fluence and of Latin temperament seemed to dis- 
courage any further attempt. They built these 
houses, and because the Mexicans, accustomed all 
their lives to live in squalor, did nothing to improve 
them, they assumed that nothing more could be 
done. They put in baths, and because the Mexican 
had never had a bath and wasn’t particularly in- 
terested in experimental adventures of the sort, they 
ealled him a dirty pig and let it go at that.~ One 
can run altruism into the ground, and the attitude 
of the company at Monte may be well enough, and is 
certainly human; but once such an attitude is as- 


t-~ 


eh 118 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


yw Ne sumed, one must take the consequences—and conse- 
\ work. 

How can any one expect men living in such houses 
—six, eight, ten souls sleeping in a little box of a 
room and breathing foul air through the night; eat- 
ing heavy, highly seasoned native concoctions and 
drinking spirits that would make an American boot- 
legger blush—to compete with the miners on the 
other side of the line, living an infinitely cleaner life, 
with fresh air and good food and guarded by health 
departments and insurance officers? And yet it 2s 
expected, and when the results are poor, the oper- 

( ators unite in one great howl of condemnation and 

| accuse the Mexican of being lazy, degenerate, and 

_ worthless. Make an American of him, or leave him 
to his happy indolence. 

When I attempted to argue the matter with those 
who had the power to bring about a change, I was 
told quite seriously that a Mexican was a Mexican, 
and that nothing could adapt him to a foreign life. 
A few broad-minded men, confronted with statistics 
from Mexican camps in the United States, looked 
to the future and ventured that fifty years from now 
things might be different—but took no steps to make 

\ them so! Entirely aside from the return on the 
¥ investment in welfare that increased efficiency would 
' bring, there were things in that camp which were 


Q quences are lowered production and irregularity of 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 119 


appalling to the most casual humanitarian. Living 
in their own filth, horribly overcrowded, the people: , 
were easy victims to disease, which would sweep} 
through the camps like wild-fire. During the sum-| 
mer months there was a continuous procession, on 
the road to the graveyard, of funerals, in which the 
little blue coffins of babies predominated. Congeni- 
tal diseases were common to an unbelievable extent, | 
and the hideous sores of the worst cases were all 
too evident on the naked bodies of the workmen one 
met underground. The resistance of the people was 
virtually nil; the simplest disorders snuffed out their 
lives like candles in a breeze. Their inability to 
withstand prolonged strain was the bane of the 
doctor’s life. 

I saw a man taken into the hospital, one day, with 
a bullet in his side, the result of an accident. The 
American surgeon in camp, a very able fellow, ex- 
tracted it without much trouble, and the man came 
out of the anesthetic in good form and gave every 
appearance of being cured. The doctor was rather 
proud of the job he had done. But two days later, 
for no apparent reason, the patient died. And the 
doctor told me the occurrence was a most common 
one: he would think he had conditions entirely under 
control, and that there was no chance of losing his 
patient, when suddenly the end would come. The 
flame of life was not strong enough; there were too 


fe 


120 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


many generations behind these people who had lived 
as they were living. But with death all around him, 
in his work and in his home, in the midst of poverty 
and squalor, the Mexican continues to be one of the 
happiest of mortals. 

The young secretary to the superintendent was a 
very serious student of Spanish and something of 
a lady-killer in his way, and exercised both his tal- 
ents in the evenings, on excursions into the Mexican 
town. There were a number of girls from the larger 


Mexican cities, teaching school, and I used to go 


down with him and call on them in their houses. 
My companion and guide said that he enjoyed him- 
self, but he was up in arms against the customs of 
the country. No unmarried girl could be out with 
a man after eighty-thirty, and he complained that 
whenever he became most interested, the fatal hour 
would leap up and catch him unawares, and his lady- 
love would murmur, ‘‘Buenas noches,’’ and dis- 
appear. | 

Most of the younger men in camp had been to 
France during the war, but they evidently had im- 
bibed little of the spirit of the family life of the 
Latins. To be unable to see a grown girl after eight- 
thirty at night seemed to them utter rot and so ridic- 
ulous that few bothered to continue an acquaintance 
after being left at the door a few times. But one or 
two hardy souls, knowing more Spanish and having 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 121 


lived in Mexico longer, persevered. They had a very 
simple formula for doing away with such absurdi- 
ties. They called not on the daughter but on the 
father and mother, and spent a week or two gravely 
discussing religion and expounding their own right- 
eousness. Then, with or without hypocrisy, having 
convinced those in authority that they could do no 
wrong, they casually met the daughter and took her 
for a walk, to talk to her for the good of her soul. 
And when righteousness is arguing with natural sin, 
temporal matters like eighty-thirty o’clock cannot 
be allowed to interfere. 

Ordinarily affairs so managed appeared to work 
out very nicely, but one young chap had a terrible 
seare. Without quite enough preparatory bombard- 
ment, he took a pretty little school-mistress for a 
walk, and, coming back at ten-thirty instead of eight, 
was met by the father, who, his face wreathed in 
smiles, congratulated the boy on having won the 
daughter’s heart and asked when the wedding would 
be. As the youngster had seen the girl only once 
before and his interest in her was really of a very 
platonic nature, the father’s attitude was somewhat 
of a shock, and it took several days’ work on the 
part of mediators to convince the old man that the 
boy had n’t known it was so late, and, besides, was 
married in the States (a slight departure from the 
truth deemed necessary to guarantee the perma- 


122 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


nency of the break). The one-night fiancé was com- 
pletely cured, and never ventured into the town 
again after dark. 

One important element in the life of a Mexican 
town is the position of John Chinaman. Barred 
alike in the republics to the north and south, the 
wanderers of his phlegmatic race have invaded vir- 
tually every part of Mexico. At Monte I found them 
engaged in many fields of activity. Along the little | 
stream below camp, their minute, neatly irrigated 
vegetable gardens struck a peculiar note of order 
and freshness amid the untidiness of the Latin and 
the barrenness of the desert. The best shops, the 
cleanest and neatest, always upon investigation were 
discovered to have Chinese proprietors. Our only 
tailoring establishment was run by a family of 
Orientals, bending over worn-out sewing-machines 
and chattering in the seeming gibberish of their lan- 
guage. They even invaded the mine. 

One of the foremen on the lower levels carried out 
a successful experiment to increase production by 
encouraging competition. He had two ‘‘raise men’’ 
working for him, one of Chinese descent, the other 
a pure Japanese, neither of whom, despite un- 
doubted efficiency, had ever broken any records or 
shown evidences of killing themselves from over- 
work. The Chinaman was called ‘‘Johnny,’’ the 
Japanese preserved his racial cognomen of ‘‘Kato.’’ 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 123 


Kato was under five feet, five inches; Johnny, I 
think, was not over the five-foot mark, but both were 
beautifully developed, and they knew their business. 
The enterprising foreman had two raises to start, 
not fifty feet apart, both to go one hundred feet up. 
He got the two men together and told them each was 
to have one of these, and that he would give a bonus 
of five pesos to the man who first ‘‘holed through”’ 
to the level above. Then he took Johnny aside and 
told him just what Kato thought about a China- 
man’s chances to win the bonus, and added, from a 
rich imagination, some comments Kato had made 
about Johnny’s personality, his ancestors, and his 
general ability as a miner. And when poor little 
Johnny was about to go on top and get his knife to 
avenge himself at once, the foreman got hold of 
Kato and told a similar story to the Japanese. 
They were both ‘‘rarin’ to go!’’ He gave them 
their machines and turned them loose. How the 
rock flew down that raise! From being tolerable 
friends, the two became the bitterest of enemies. 
The first twenty feet went beautifully, and then both 
struck a stratum of hard rock which defied human 
endeavor and dulled steel as if it were lead. The 
contestants complained, each in turn, that he had 
been given a raw deal. The boss had the engineer 
measure the heights and, finding them within a few 
inches of each other, offered to let the men change 


\ 


| 


124 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


workings. Reassured that no one was trying to 
handicap the race, they returned, and the foreman, 
relenting, got permission from the superintendent to 
assign an American instructor to help them. 

The instructors are expert old American miners, 
brought down to teach the Mexicans new and better 
ways of drilling, and if a man will take their advice 
he can usually double his earning capacity. But 
when the American went down, a new factor entered 
the race to complicate it. He went in and told them 
both that he would help first one and then the other, 
spending alternate days in each raise. Johnny, the 
Chinaman, folded his hands and shook his head vig- 
orously up and down, all smiles; the toughness of 
the rock had gotten him. But Kato, when ap- 
proached, became violently angry. He had been in- 
sulted: if he couldn’t break that ground, no one 
could; he would take no aid, and if the American 
knew what was most wise, he would get out of his 
sight at once before he hit him on the head with a 
drill steel. 

The result was that little Johnny—with a tough 
old veteran, somewhat provoked with the other’s 
rebuff, at his side—broke three feet to Kato’s two 
and reached the goal a week ahead of the indepen- 
dent Japanese. They never did settle the dispute 
(although Johnny got the five pesos). Kato felt, 
and probably will feel to his dying day, that his was 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 125 


the moral victory, but the side betting in the office, 
which was heavy, was paid on the Chinaman, and it 
was he who broke the mine record for one hundred 
feet of vertical raising. 

The Mexicans, on the whole, are not too enthusi- 
astic about their permanent guests; in fact, in revo- 
lutions they are inclined to make short shrift of 
them and stimulate competition by killing off all the 
Chinamen and giving other merchants a new chance. | 
But except in such crises the Chinese and the 
natives jibe fairly well; the foreigners learn the 
language easily and are looked upon as very satis- 
factory catches in the marriage market. Little won- } 
der, for, whatever else he may do, the Oriental treats 
his wife with great consideration, and, exponents of; 
cave-man policies to the contrary, I think the aver- 
age woman would rather be comfortable, have good 
clothes to wear, and be treated with respect than to 
see her husband’s earnings go into the pocket of the 
saloon-keeper and get her only dividend in a Satur- , 
day night’s beating. 

Drunkenness brings out every bad trait in the 
Mexican, and is the biggest factor to be considered 
in living with him. I am no prohibitionist, but the 
misery alcohol causes among these people makes one 
think. They have a taste for strong spirits which 
is almost a mania. When every man is so drunk one 
day in five that he cannot work the next, alcohol 


126 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


becomes a force in every-day existence. As nearly 
as I could estimate, there was a murder in camp on 
an average of once in every ten days, and I think in 
ninety per cent of the cases one or both parties were 
drunk. 

The Mexican officials have a very free-and-easy 
way of dealing with such offenders. I remember one 
brawl that took place at about five o’clock in the 
afternoon. We were just coming up from the office, 
when we were startled by the sound of a pistol-shot 
somewhere in the valley. Shooting is common at 
night and usually means only an exuberance of 
spirits, mental and distilled, but in the afternoon it 
is a little out of the ordinary. This time it was fol- 
lowed by a blood-curdling scream and a great deal 
of shouting. We stopped, of course, and saw several 
members of the police department rush out of the 
town hall and disappear up one of the gulches. 
Presently they came back, each dragging, half en- 
couraging, half supporting, an unsteady figure, and 
surrounded by an excited mob. They got their pris- 
oners into the jail, all right, the crowd dispersed, 
and we went down to find out what had hap- 
pened. The jailer told us that it was nothing of any 
importance. 

‘‘These two idiots were a little excited over some 
trifle, and in sport began to flourish their weapons— 
nothing but a puny bit of a thirty-two revolver and 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 127 


a measly six-inch pen-knife. Of course they had 
been drinking, but nothing would have come of it if 
an old miner had n’t passed by and stepped between 
them. The combatants were, naturally, annoyed, 
and one shot the miner with the toy pistol while the 
other stuck the knife into his back. They are both 
sorry they were so thoughtless, but the man is dead! 
It is a nuisance, but I had to lock them both up!’’ 

It certainly was a nuisance, because the jail was 
already full, and a full jail was a tremendous drag 
on what little graft passed through the jailer’s 
hands. It evidently preyed upon the poor official’s 
mind, as the prisoners would in all probability re- 
main there six or eight months before it would be 
auspicious to try them. It must have been a con- 
tinual strain on the man, because it brought a weary 
look into his face, and as the weeks went by he be- 
came more and more absent-minded. At last it came 
to such a pass that leaving for home one evening, 
engrossed in thoughts of the dance to be given that 
night, where with a little wine he could get his mind 
off his work for a while, he quite forgot to lock the 
jail door after him. And it was a good four hours 
before the omission came to him. 

‘“‘Hour hours!’’ He must have shrugged his 
shoulders. ‘‘What a pity, all the prisoners will be 
gone! But how fortunate that I forgot, also, to or- 
der food for them on the morrow! Well, nothing 


128 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


ean be done about it; enter it in the book, ‘Escaped,’ 
and say no more about the matter!”’ 

But this is not nearly so flagrant a miscarriage of 
justice as it seems. It works out very well: the State 
is saved much expense, and the offenders will never 
come back: return engagements with revengeful 
relatives of the deceased are too easily arranged! 

Occurrences like the foregoing annoyed the Amer- 
icans intensely, but they appeared to me to be little 
worse than the workings of the unwritten law over 
the border. In Arizona, I saw one very dramatic 
murder, with my own eyes. The background to the 
affair, I learned later, was rather peculiar. One 
miner had been paying considerable attention to an- 
other’s wife. The aggrieved man took a very sen- 
sible attitude and packed up his belongings and left 
camp. He had been working in another camp, sev- 
eral hundred miles away, for only a week when the 
other man showed up. The husband thought it over 
and again bundled his family on to new fields. The 
other point of the triangle followed. 

The thing had gone on, I was told, for several 
years, the same drama being enacted in nearly every 
camp in the Union. When the curtain went up for 
the tragedy, the exponent of virtue had been in Ari- 
zona several months before the other man appeared. 
When he did, he got a job underground and was put 
on the same shift that I was then with. At the time 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 129 


no one knew about the affair or paid any attention 
to the new miner; miners are pretty silent about 
their own business. 

The end came a little after seven on an October 
morning. Our shift had just changed into their 
‘‘digging clothes’? and were sitting in the ‘‘drying 
house’’ or on the ground before it. I had changed, 
too, and was leaning against the doorway of the 
house, fooling with my lamp. The new man also 
was in his underground clothes, standing idly in the 
center of a little plateau before the tunnel which 
opened into the mine. Suddenly I saw a man—a 
stranger to me—come up the steps to the house and 
cross slowly over to the miner. He was dressed in 
street clothes, but wore no coat, and although he 
walked calmly enough, there was something menac- 
ing in his bearing. He went straight up to the miner 
and said very distinctly: 

‘‘Stand right still a minute, you——!’’ 

Then, before any one could move, he reached into 
his shirt, pulled out a long black lugger revolver and 
shot the man before him through the temple. The 
murdered man crumpled up and fell at the other’s 
feet. Hypnotized, no one moved. The murderer put 
the gun back into his shirt and walked by me into 
the ‘‘dry,’’ where half a hundred men were chang- 
ing. At the door he stopped and announced in a 
loud voice: 


130 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


‘‘Tf yer want to see a good man, who ’Il stay good 
now, I ’ve got one here for yer!’’ 

Then he strode out and down the steps and across 
to the police station which stood opposite the mine, 
and gave himself up. 

And yet this man got off scot-free. His wife’s 
testimony and a few letters were all that were 
needed. The father of the murdered boy (for he 
was only twenty-one or twenty-two) came to camp 
from Texas to testify for the killer, believing his 
son to have received his due. Now, all this may 
have all been perfectly legitimate in the light of a 
higher justice, but it establishes a dangerous prece- 
dent because it indicates that all a man need do to be 
acquitted of murder is to hire a lawyer and bring a 
woman into the case. And this murderer is a free 
and respected citizen, whereas the Mexican offender 
will be a fugitive the rest of his life, which is n’t apt 
to be a long one. | 

Sensational crime, however, is not the principal 
effect of the serious drinking propensities of the na- 
tives. The entire social system makes allowances 
for it. Take the method of paying men, which I 
mentioned before. An arrangement for the advance 
of a certain amount each day takes for granted that 
when the balance is paid it will do the family ex- 
chequer no good. And it certainly does not! The 


wives of the miners get their daily credit at the 


Pe a 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 181 


store and hasten to turn it into food and clothing 
before their easy-going husbands come up from un- 
derground and fall victims to overpowering thirst. 

The days on which the balances are paid are event- 
ful. Different groups of men are paid on different 
days, or life in the town would be one great drink- 
ing-contest; perhaps even the company fears a tem- 
porary drought from the strain such a day would 
put on the cantinas. There is a typical procedure. 

The miner draws his pay in gold and silver, and 
sets out for the nearest cantina. Creditors must 
catch him in the few hundred feet he has to traverse, 
or all is lost for another week. At his favorite can- 
tina he sets up court, both hands full of clinking 
coins. After a few drinks, every miner passing the 
open door (Mexican saloons have n’t acquired the 
swinging door as yet) is asked in to join the merry- 
making. When half a dozen drinks have gone down 
the well-worn path, a strange local custom comes 
into effect. The reveler hires a band. 

The band itself is an oddity. It usually consists 
of a violin, a guitar, and a bass fiddle. It knows 
three tunes; if it learned and played any others, it 
would be boycotted. The miner collects his band 
and contracts for it by the hour. Its duty then is to 
follow its patron, wherever he may roam, up hill 
and down, to serenade in turn his numerous friends 
and relatives, and to keep him in a good humor. It 


1382 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


never stops playing—each one of the three tunes 
over and over again. The most extraordinary phe- 
nomenon is the man who plays the bass fiddle; he 
actually carries it, caught between his chin and his 
shoulder, walks with it, climbs mountains with it, 
and plays it at the same time. On important occa- 
sions a small boy carries the heel of it, while the 
musician, grasping the stem, saws merrily away. 

As long as the miner’s money holds out, this band 
tags along behind the man, usually receiving a bonus 
of strong liquor every so often. No one ever tires 
of the three tunes, and almost any morning, walking 
down to work at six-thirty, I used to hear the old 
familiar melodies floating up from the valley, still 
making the rounds. When a miner is very rich, the 
band will play forty-eight hours with hardly any 
intermission. I have always wanted to promote a 
non-stop dancing and playing contest wherein some 
of our American notoriety-seekers might meet their 
match in these serious professional musicians. 

They certainly lend color to the life of the place, 
these peripatetic minstrels, for they are natural mu- 
sicians and their pieces weird compositions in the 
minor which are fascinating to the foreigner. The 
same group of tunes is used indiscriminately for all — 
occasions — midnight serenading, weddings, and 
funerals. 

The funerals are great events. I remember the — 


CONCERNING THE MEXICAN TOWN 138 


first one I witnessed. I wrote the following note 
about it in my diary: 


Saw them earrying a coffin up the hill to-day. Stood on Fifth 
Avenue, as they call the parade in front of the office, and looked 
right down into it, as it was open. It was robin’s-egg blue, 
which seems to be the color now in vogue; looked very small but 
had a full-grown Mexican in it. It was preceded by the orchestra 
with that ridiculous little ape sawing at the bass viol he carried 
screwed under his chin, playing the same tune [ heard last night 
at the dance. Hight men were carrying the coffin on their 
shoulders, walking lock-step, and another followed, balancing the 
lid on his head. There were a few mourners, all men, behind, 
looking very sour, for the man was murdered two days ago, a 
passer-by told me. The wind was blowing and I could n’t be sure 
there was any one in the thing at first, because he was set in a 
mass of wavy tissue paper which fluttered all about; but finally 
this blew aside and there he lay in a pink-and-white striped shirt. 
He was having a rough ride of it, too, for the trail up is no boule- 
vard. They turned off half-way up and started circling around 
the hill below the saloons. I stood and watched them for some 
time. 


Before that funeral reached its destination, it de- 
generated into a riot, but I did not learn the fact 
until later. The Mexican funeral is the only real 
rival of the famous Irish wake, and every one in this 
particular party was a little the worse for drink, 
when a relative of the murderer was sighted. The 
‘‘nall-bearers’’ set the coffin down, deserted on the 
rough side of the mountain, and gave chase, but the 
enemy was too swift for them, so there was nothing 
to do but have another drink and finish the business 
of burying their friend. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 


HE cast of characters in that drama known as 
the ‘‘ American Colony at Monte’’ was the roll 
of American officials in the mine. There were the 
“ superintendent, whom we have already met, his as- 
vsistant, the heads of the mechanical, electrical, and 
vsundry-supplies departments, and, behind these 
principals, the chorus of foremen, engineers, and 
velerks. To most of the ‘“‘jefes,’’ as the bosses are 
called, one may add ‘‘and wife.’’ The casting of 
these parts was the problem of a general manager, 
who, fortunately, did not have to stay and see the 
show but derived his information, as to the success 
of his choices, from the box-office receipts, cost- 
sheets being sent daily, weekly, and monthly for his 
inspection. His main difficulty lay not in re-casting 
but in replacing members of the company who be- 
came ‘‘fed up’’ with the long run of the play. 
For whether the performers thought the scenery 
cheap, the plot poor, or their fellow-actors indiffer- 
ent, the personnel of the theater was continually 


changing. They certainly could not complain of 
134 


THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 135 


their Mexican house, because that was always full. 
But as there were no contracts, their runs varied 
from one night up. In the first two months after I 
left camp, my former room-mate wrote me, there 
were two new chief electricians, a new chief engi- 
neer, three new doctors, and a fifty-percent turn- 
over in the department I had been in. During my 
first three months at Monte, over a dozen jobs — 
changed hands. And all this in a camp where there 
were only some thirty-five American men in all! L- 
Such prodigious evidences of unrest seemed to me, 
at first, almost incredible. When I was told of them, 
I felt like the farmer who for the first time saw a 
giraffe and after a prolonged study of the beast 
solemnly declared, ‘‘There ain’t no sech animal!’’ 
I found it hard to believe that life in a mining-camp 
could be better-ordered or pleasanter than the life 
at Monte. True, the setting was a bit rough, but 
there was more than compensation for this in its 
wild beauty. The stage scenery, to prolong the 
simile, gave every appearance of being adequate; 
married men were given—no, rented—what seemed 
to be attractive enough little houses lining the fash- 
ionable thoroughfare up the hill known as ‘‘Persh-'~ 
ing Drive,’’ each house with its minute irrigated 
garden in front, where the almost-green grass and 
peach- and fig-trees were neatly fenced off from the 
roving burro; single men lived in a big dormitory 


136 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


at the top of the hill, ate at a common mess, and 
slept on a broad veranda which encircled the 
building. 

Regarding the part each actor played, I have al- 
ready suggested the advantages of working in a 
foreign country, far from authoritative fingers 
which might dabble in one’s pie; and as for the so- 
cial life, it seemed impossible that a little group as 
isolated as we were should not make up for lack in 
numbers by a freedom and an intimacy and a gayety 
which would be an intense relief after the society of 
the East. I thought of Richard Harding Davis’s 
‘‘Hixiles’’ and of a host of romances of the great 
broad West, and resolved that no narrowness of 


Eastern prejudice should keep me from being one of | 


the group. 

I admit that I had much to learn. One need only 
talk with a few individuals and make one or two 
calls, to sense the power of a Four Hundred at 
Monte that would have delighted old Ward McAI- 
lister. A social system in a camp with no more 
than sixty souls! 

‘‘T know I ’m foolish,’’ one girl told me, ‘‘but my 
husband does all his work, and he gets ten dollars a 
month more!’’ and the invariable end to such com- 
plaints, ‘‘But of course we ’re here only for a short 
time: this job is just a sort of filler, you know!”’ 

Why? I wondered. They were all nice people. 


THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 1387 


The men had undoubted opportunities, and living 
was cheap enough, at least by my standards. 
Another of the engineers, a young chap from Mis- 
souri who had worked all through South America, 
told me his budget for living-expenses. He had a 
wife and a boy about eight years old. Their house 
cost them twenty dollars a month; they had a Mexi- 
ean girl to help out, and every modern convenience 
included in a realtor’s pean of praise—electric 
lights, hot and cold water, and two minutes’ run 
(down-hill) to work. In the morning the vegetable 
man, a withered old Chinaman, came along with a 
string of burros loaded with fresh vegetables, and 
the wife stood at her gate and selected what she 
wished, and argued with the huckster, in the six or 
eight Spanish phrases she had picked up. She had 
only a hundred yards to walk to the meat market, 
where a quarter would buy enough steak for a Sun- 
day dinner. And for all this, the young man told 
me, he and his wife allowed just one hundred dollars 
a month. Moreover, as it was impossible to give 
theater parties and luncheons at ‘‘Pierre’s,’’ they 
could entertain as elaborately as any one else in 
camp, with no more expense than the extra food and 
perhaps a bridge prize. The company employed a 
school-teacher, an American girl about whom I shall 
have more to say later, to teach the dozen or more 
children, and there was a dance at the dormitory 


ene 


138 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


every other Saturday. What more could an ordi- 
nary individual want? All this, set to an exotic 
background, with not even prohibition to darken 
sunny skies! 

The rub, I discovered, came mainly with the wo- 
men. The men had always the common basis of 
their occupation. Wherever they came from, New 
York or Arizona, they were there to get copper out 
of the ground, to stand side by side, and to acquire 
that understanding which comes from having worked 
beside a man through good luck and bad. But the 
women, gathered together from all over the United 
States, imbued with that characteristic American 
democratic desire to attain social prominence, were 
a different story. The majority came from Main 
Street towns (indeed, Sinclair Lewis would have 
been delighted with most of them), where they had 
or had not amounted to much socially. But when 
they journeyed afar into a foreign land, they all 
found an embryo society of which they as well as any 
one else might be the leader. Pasts were easy to 
talk of and hard to prove. At once their early lives 
became intensely rosy; there was not the slightest 
doubt that they were all used to much better things, 
much more exclusive friends, and in general an en- 
tirely different (and higher) rung of the social lad- 
der. They all wanted more than anything else to 


THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 139 


be back in that rarefied air they had left, and were 
obviously putting up with the others at Monte and 
making the best of a bad deal. 

With one or two exceptions, none of the women 
spoke even tolerable Spanish, or cared to. They 
were strongly convinced of the inferiority of the 
Mexicans, their chief criticisms of the natives being 
that they were clumsy in waiting on table and did 
not know how to make beds. 

There was some reason in the latter criticism. I 
remember one woman who tried to break in a 
‘‘rreen’’ little girl of fourteen or fifteen. The child 
had never seen more bed-clothes than a single 
blanket, and could not understand the use of sheets. 
First she took them off the bed, carefully folded 
them up, and put them away. To her they were 
priceless pieces of material for ball dresses, which 
would be defiled by contact with the blankets. 
When finally persuaded that they must be sacrificed, 
she spread one out on top of the blankets and hung 
one over the end of the bed, believing them to be for 
decorative purposes. And even after the correct 
procedure was demonstrated in detail by an exas- 
perated mistress, for weeks no one could foretell 
just where the sheets would turn up; for, once con- 
vineed of the idiocy of the Americans in wasting 
good linen, she was sure that it could n’t make much 


140 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


difference in what part of the bed the sheets were 
put, as long as the place was, from her point of view, 
thoroughly inappropriate. 

There were, in the rough, three social sets on the 
hill: those who never gave any parties, and asso- 
ciated with the rest of the camp only at the dances; 
those who were what the society papers call the 
‘‘active leaders,’’ whose one ambition was some- 
thing original for their next party; and that reac- 
tionary element whose invitations meant something 
and whose prominence was based on substantial dif- 
ferences in pay-roll figures. I really never found 
out what the first were like, for they were not very 
approachable, but I have an idea they were the best 
of the lot. Of course I went to every party to which 
I was asked. 

I had never before realized that one must be ex- 
ceedingly intimate or truly cosmopolitan to be in- 
formal. One Wednesday afternoon, after I had been 
in camp for about a month, one of my bosses drew 
me aside, with an air of having weighty matters to 
impart. I wondered, vaguely, just what particular 
mistake I had made that day, and was a bit appre- 
hensive, but it turned out that he was only inviting 
me to dinner on Saturday, before the dance. 

‘‘Very informal, you know, just a tamale feed 
with the folks. At seven. Fine! we ’ll be awfully 
glad to see you!’’ 


— - 2 


THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 141 


The last remark sounded odd, because I saw them 
both every day of the week. 

Saturday came in due time, as Saturdays will de- 
spite the pessimism of the middle of the week, and 
as the affair was ‘‘very informal’’ and ‘‘with the 
folks,’’ I didn’t even bother to change out of my 
office clothes. I trotted down the hill about five 
minutes late (I ’m always late for everything) and 
knocked at the door. My chief swung it open at 
once, staggering me by his suddenness and the splen- 
dor of his attire. For he was dressed in a sharply 
pressed business suit, with a stiff collar and silver 
tie, and his handkerchief was just the correct half- 
inch of white above his breast pocket. His wife, a 
charming person, was behind him in a pseudo even- 
ing dress, very new and shiny. 

‘*T think you ’ve met my wife.’’ I certainly had 
—three times a day, going up and down from the 
office. ‘‘And Mr. Neal?’’ I met Mr. Neal, having 
chatted with him only a dozen times in the tienda. 
We then sat down in a formal circle and I noticed 
that Mr. Neal also was beautifully gotten up. The 
conversational stand-by west of the Mississippi was 
at once brought into play. I was asked how I liked 
the Great West. 

But I managed to withstand the fire until the 
ship, and my appetite, were saved by the appearance, 
through some curtains at the other end of the room, 


142 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


of a shy, dark-skinned girl in misfitting calico, who 
muttered something about ‘‘Din-serve,’’ and disap- 
peared. We trooped in, and presently I found my- 
self seated at the most resplendent table I have ever 
seen classified as informal. There was a glistening 
new table-cloth, all a-sparkle with silver (four forks, 
two knives, and two spoons apiece), and illuminated 
with four tall candles set in silver candlesticks. It 
was a very pretty board, but a little overawing. 

The conversation, however, maintained the tone. 
There were golf and swimming, set in the fashion- 
able coast resorts of the States, a good deal of the 
old reliable weather (although in Monte the weather 
never changed), and, of course, an undertow of so- 
licitation for my attitude toward this newest of 
civilizations. It seemed to me a trifle like ‘‘fishing,’’ 
but perhaps I was prejudiced, because I had wanted 
to know my superior’s family and what they were 
really like, and I felt that I could get a much more 
genuine article in the way of sophisticated small talk 
from reading ‘‘Vanity Fair’’—or so the advertise- 
ments told me. 

Bear in mind the desert about this oasis; do not 
forget that I was dining with people whom I worked 
with and saw every day of my life, and that there 
were only a few of us, isolated, with over a hundred 
miles of nothing between us and even a border town. 
The little Mexican maid served grape-fruit on ice, 


THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 148 


soup in gilt-edged plates, and tamales, unwrapped 
from their corn husks and with special sauce, to be 
eaten primly with the correct fork (ascertained by 
careful observation of my hostess, as the etiquette 
of eating tamales was not included in my early train- 
ing). There also were salad and dessert, each course 
punctuated with apologies for the unintelligence of 
the servant who crept timidly in and out, always on 
the verge of spilling something. By the time dinner 
was over—a good hour—the beer which accompa- 
nied it had improved the situation, but the enjoy- 
ment of my after-dinner cigar was a little marred by 
a serious discussion of the merits of ‘‘doubling one.’’ 

I was astonished to find that subsequent dinners 
were not materially different from this one. The 
dances were much more enjoyable. There were two 
natural musicians among the clerks in the mine of- 
fice: one played the piano (the transportation of a 
piano to this mountain-top must have been a feat in 
itself) and the other the saxophone. The night fore- 
man was an expert with the traps, and had every 
other Saturday off in which to help the cause. The 
whole camp was there and I met them in their en- 
tirety, enjoying the opportunity to dress up and 
expounding the theory that it’s never too late to 
dance. The affairs were pleasant, even if one had to 
contract for a partner seven dances ahead. 

I could never understand this leaning toward the 


144 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


formal in Monte, and was continually making social 
blunders, such as not dressing for my first dinner. 
At bridge parties I was even worse form, for they 
too were rites in themselves. The guests all came 
on time and stood in a sort of herd until the busy 
hostess started the fun of the evening with some 
delightful trick about finding places. One might be 
given a line of poetry on a card and told to search 
for the rhyming line, which would be at one’s place, 
or discover a picture (cut from a ‘‘Saturday Eve- 
ning Post’’ advertisement) which suggested a title 
to be found on one of the tables. All the conven- 
tional remarks about being stupid were then made. 
With only my commonplace name, which I ’ve known 
most of my life, to find, I can usually be in my place 
at a formal dinner after thirty-two laps around the 
table (if not deceived by some other guest’s sit- 
ting in my chair), but with a puzzle to solve as well, 
there is only one course for me to pursue, which is 
to slink off into a corner and wait until the rest 
of the guests are seated. 

And the ceremonious game which followed all this 
was played in silence, with the desert night outside, 
strolling care-free minstrels wandering through the 
camp below, and the ceaseless thunder of the shops 
echoing in the hills as the night shift carried on the 
battle with the earth. 


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THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 145 


But bridge at its worst was a mild form of tor- 
ture instituted by a kindly god to prepare suffering 
humanity for the burden of Mah Jong, which suc- 
ceeded it in popularity. For months the clouds 
gathered as the matrons of the colony read, in let- 
ters from relatives in the States and in the papers, 
of the growing vogue of the Chinese game, until at 
last the tension in the heavens became too great: all 
the world was playing Mah Jong; Monte must! 

I might have loved Mah Jong, as I really love 
good bridge, but it soon became a religious cere- 
mony, and religious ceremonies, at their best, are 
poor sport. First there was the player who always 
upset his wall in the building. Roars of laughter. 
Then the idiot who remarked that unless a certain 
part of the wall was set aside, the moon would fall ° 
into the sea. He (or she) was chided for believ- 
ing such foolishness. Then began the serious busi- 
ness of the game, which was inventing new names 
for the pieces. Circles were called ‘‘cart-wheels’’; 
characters had to be ‘‘crackers’’; bamboos, ‘‘bean- 
poles,’’ and the white dragon ‘‘a cake of soap,’’ 
familiarly known as ‘‘Ivory.’’ Hach player adopted 
one of these little witticisms and repeated it not 
under a hundred times an evening. It got to be the 
most restful game imaginable, for, once the rite 
was mastered, the entire play might be carried on 


aw 


146 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


by the nerve centers located somewhere in the lower 
spine. My own personal handicap was that when 
operating from this base I invariably fell asleep. 

Games are peculiar indications of mass psy- 
chology. The social life of Monte was restricted to 
the five or six hours that remained after the day’s 
work was done; that three or four of these hours 
should be devoted to such artificial amusements was 
astonishing. JI have read of Englishmen who go out 
into the wilderness and, living there, dress for din- 
ner, play cards in the evening, and build golf-courses 
on Sunday. The point to remember, however, is that 
these men were accustomed to do these things be- 
fore they left civilization and that they are trying, 
by means of preserving their customs and games, to 
keep themselves in touch with the lives they have 
left. The American exiles, on the other hand, were 
simulating something they never knew. They did 
not play Mah Jong and bridge because they had 
learned, in their youth, to love them, but because 
they suffered from an inferiority complex which 
they were endeavoring to dispel by imitating people 
who played these games. The effect was peculiarly 
insincere, and they must have felt it, for they en- 
trenched themselves behind the barriers of for- 
mality on every possible occasion. 

My only really exciting evening of Mah Jong was 
not quite orthodox. One evening, during a dance, 


THE AMERICAN COLONY ON THE HILL 147 


we got up a sporting foursome which consisted of 
two old-time foremen, a young clerk who had once 
been a professional dancer, and myself. We neg- 
lected the accepted Mah Jong conversation, and, 
lacking this inspiration, were losing interest, when 
the clerk, shaking the dice to decide who should have 
the honor of being East Wind (and have all walls 
move up to his), was suddenly fascinated by the 
realization of what he was doing. The clicking of 
the little ivories struck a forgotten chord in his 
memory, and his eyes lit up. If anything, the rest 
of us were ahead of him in reading his thoughts. 
With one accord we rose from the table and trooped 
into the dance-hall. 

At one end of the long room stood a billiard-table 
around which the stag line was grouped. The clerk, 
still shaking the dice meditatively, made his way 
straight to this spot and, clearing a space, whis- 
pered the magic formula, ‘‘One quarter open, boys!’’ 
The stag line turned its back to the room and 
crowded closer. Round and round the dice swept, 
until silver dollars alone proclaimed a difference of 
opinion as to Fate’s patronage of the man who held 
the magic symbols. When the music stopped, half 
the men dancing deserted their wives and joined 
the game. The reactionary other half kept up 
bravely, but the crowning blow came when the mu- 
sicians themselves were no longer able to resist the 


148 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


eall. Mah Jong had turned and bitten the hands 
that fed it! 

Public opinion at Monte was very much against 
gambling in mixed company, as it was against any 
of the acknowledged petty vices in women. As long 
as the outposts of civilization live up to the stand- 
ards of morality that Monte held to, the world is 
safe. I suppose that when the emperors of Rome 
were holding their Bacchic revels in the capital, the 
legionaries in Gaul were strong in protest against 
their wives’ inaugurating a new style of bare shoul- 
ders. At Monte, for a woman to smoke, even in 
private, was a sacrilege; she might drink, but beer 
or claret only. Flirtation was of the obvious kind: 
‘““You might hold my hand if my husband were n’t 
looking !’’ (in a loud voice). 

On the border I heard one woman openly boasting 
that she had told her daughter, who had made an 
amateur sensation by contemplating a theatrical 
career, that if she went on the stage, her sisters 
would not be able to speak to her! And yet one of 
this woman’s best friends, painted in a crude imita- 
tion of a circus clown, drank boot-leg gin in the 
men’s locker-room at the country-club dances, com- 
pletely deceiving her own daughter—who was doing 
the same thing in a car parked outside! But Monte 
—thank Heaven !—was behind the times and had not 
mastered such good American hypocrisy. 


CHAPTER VIII 
NIGHT LIFE 


HILE I had gone in search of the home life 

of the Mexican by day and had had that of 
the American thrust upon me, I had yet to discover 
just what my workmen did with their evenings, be- 
yond hiring a band and destroying their neighbors’ 
sleep. They couldn’t all have bands,—there 
weren’t enough to go around,—but the after ef- 
fects of too-gay evenings were universal, and IL 
could hardly accuse the race of toping alone at 
home. There must be more festive places that one 
does not hear of, I thought to myself, and for a 
time let it go at that. 

One night, however, after two months’ residence 
in camp had given me the right to call myself an 
old-timer, we were sitting in the back room of 
Pete’s cantina when a trip into the forbidden ter- 
ritory of Monte was proposed. I had thought that 
‘‘oraveyard shifts’’ in the mine were as near night 
life in the under-world as I should get, but there 
were rumors of a district known as the ‘‘Alps,’’ and 


when a visit to it was suggested, I accepted the 
149 


150 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


chance to investigate. There were three of us—a 
little chap named Van Allen who worked in the 
store and spoke excellent Spanish, one of the gen- 
eral-office men, who spoke none at all, and I. None 
of us had ever made the trip, so we rapped on the 
table and summoned Pete to our assistance. 

Pete, the most prosperous saloon-keeper in camp, 
was a round globule of a man with the smallest 
beads for eyes and a strong Castilian lisp in his 
speech. We explained to him our desire for ad- 
venture, and, all of us being excellent customers, 
he consented to act as our guide himself. He ex- 
plained that the district we were about to visit was 
a ‘closed area’’ after ten o’clock, and as that hour 
was almost upon us we set out at once. 

It was a bright moonlit night, and as we wound 
down into the valley Pete pointed out our objective. 
It certainly belied its reputation in its location, for 
the buildings he indicated were silhouetted against 
the sky-line on the very top of the peak on the other 
side of the town from the American colony. I 
gathered from later observation that it was put 
above the rest of the town to facilitate one’s re- 
turn after a visit, for it is obviously easier We fall 
down-hill than up. 

As we got farther and farther away from the 
eolony, stumbling and catching ourselves in our 
descent into the valley, the feeling of adventure 


NIGHT LIFE 151 


became stronger and stronger. We passed many 
figures, heavily muffled, although the night was not 
cold, and to each gave a chorus of salutation: 
‘‘Buenas noches, senor!’’ Failure to extend this 
greeting puts one already three quarters of the way 
into trouble after dark. At length we crossed the 
eulch and began the ascent of the other mountain- 
side. Half-way up, the winding street came 
abruptly out into a typical Mexican graveyard, 
the graves heavily coated with cement and above 
the ground, lighting up weirdly in the moonlight. 
It was a final touch of eeriness, for we had just 
entered it when the strains of muffled music from 
the settlement came floating down to us on the 
night air. 

The aspect of the houses above was mysteri- 
ous in itself: long adobe buildings without win- 
dows; little gleams of light coming from the cracks 
around the single door of each, and the sound of 
music and merrymaking within. Pete put his finger 
to his lips and led us around to a small door in the 
rear of one house and knocked very lightly the cor- 
rect three times. The portal at once opened an inch 
or two, and a hurried whispering ensued. Evi- 
dently the guardian was satisfied with our ref- 
erences, for he pulled the door half open and we 
slid through after Pete. 

What a scene! A long hall, perhaps fifty feet 


152 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


by twenty, with bare adobe walls and a rough board 
floor, gaping cracks showing between the planks. 
Across one end the great mahogany bar, by the side 
of which we had entered, and in the far corner the 
orchestra, in bright silk shirts and slouch hats, 
sawing away at their stringed instruments. In 
front of shelves bright with bottles, and behind 
the bar, three bar-tenders in shirt-sleeves and open 
vests, and seated on the bar, banging their heels, 
half a dozen laughing girls with bare shoulders, in 
skirts of tinsel that came to their knees and bright- 
colored cotton stockings. Before them, a crowd of 
miners, in muddy ‘‘digging clothes’’ and great som- 
breros, brandished tall steins of beer and drank to 
the women amid much clinking of glasses. Out on 
the floor a handful of couples danced wildly, with 
short, bobbing motions, the man and the girl tightly 
interwoven. The sides of the hall were lined with 
benches, all crowded with men who beat time with 
their feet and shouted encouragement or approval 
to the dancers. The whole scene was lighted by 
flickering oil-lamps, set high in iron brackets on the 
wall, and had the air of a perfect ‘‘set’’ for a mo- 
tion picture of the days of forty-nine. 

A few men eyed us as we entered, but shrugged 
their shoulders and kept a hostile distance, so we 
did the most logical thing and lined up at the bar 
and ordered a drink. All three bar-tenders at once 


NIGHT LIFE 153 


got into action drawing beer, and before we knew 
it it became evident that we had ‘‘set them up for 
the house’’! This proved a lucky turn, for, although 
through no fault of ours, we had done exactly what 
was expected of us; our health was drunk with a 
shout and we were accepted as ‘‘regular.”’ 

We had come just in time, for hardly had we 
emptied our glasses when the two doors of the 
place were locked and bolted with a mighty clanging 
of iron, and the portcullis was down for the evening. 
The excitement within, however, went on unabated, 
and I began to take stock of it. There were, in 
all, perhaps a score of girls, all of the dark Span- 
ish type except one wisp of a child whose high cheek- 
bones and stern expression told of a predominance 
of Indian blood. Most of them were rather pretty, 
though horribly over-made-up, but the majority 
verged on fatness. All were drinking beer, as fast 
as they could get any one to buy them the drinks, 
and at least appeared to be having the time of their 
lives, shouting and singing and flirting with much 
rolling of their great dark eyes. 

I was leaning against the bar, smoking a cigar- 
ette, and admiring the genuineness of the spectacle, 
—which was of a kind I had thought ceased to exist 
with the passing of the gold rushes,—when one of 
the girls, who looked no more than a pretty child 
who had gotten hold of her mother’s make-up box 


154 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


and played with it, came over to me and vaulted 
lightly to the bar at my side. She took off my hat 
(which it had seemed etiquette to leave on), mussed 
my hair playfully, and demanded a drink. I stood 
by, not knowing exactly what was expected, while 
she drank the beer I ordered for her, and my com- 
panions roared with laughter. I gathered from her 
conversation (why is it one can understand a for- 
eign language spoken by a girl more easily than by 
a man?) that she wanted to dance, and before I 
could adequately remonstrate she leaped down and 
led me through the crowd to the open space before 
the orchestra. 

They were a highly accomplished lot, those mu- 
sicians, playing entirely by ear, in a peculiar time 
that wasn’t quite a tango nor yet a ‘‘rag,’’ filled 
with minor harmonies. The air of the thing they 
were playing seemed strangely familiar, and yet 
persisted in eluding me until at last I caught a bar 
and recognized ‘‘On the Beach at Waikiki’’! They 
had heard it played, probably years before, and had 
memorized the melody and given it their own in- 
terpretation. 

I anticipated a good deal of trouble with this 
dancing business, because what little style I had 
was not that of the dancers before me, and my cap- 
tress came about up to the third button on my vest. 
I did n’t like it at all, especially as the boys with me 


NIGHT LIFE 155 


were anything but reserved in demonstrating their 
appreciation. However, as retreat was impossible, 
I struck out. 

But just here something happened which turned 
the attention of the crowd from my partner and me 
and concluded my evening. One of the biggest and 
most brazen of the women had been standing aloof 
from the crowd, off in one corner, watching with 
ferocious intensity a little affair that was going 
on by the bar. The Indian girl was talking with 
a young cow-boy in woolly chaps and shirt open at 
the bosom. They had evidently just met, but were 
becoming more and more interested in each other, 
and as their conversation warmed, the dark clouds 
gathered on the lone woman’s face. I had noticed 
her before we began to dance, but had forgotten all 
about her, when suddenly there was a scream from 
the bar. The big Mexican had thrown herself be- 
tween the boy and the girl,—just as their lips were 
about to meet, I believe,—and was tearing at the 
girl’s hair. 

No one offered to interfere, and the crowd around 
them gave way in silence. It was a brutal procedure. 
The big woman grasped the straight hair of the 
other in her left hand and, holding the girl at arm’s 
length, flailed her with her right in a most masculine 
way. The girl shrieked and tore at the hand woven 
in her hair, but was dragged across the room, the 


156 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


fist of the fury crashing with lightning rapidity into 
her face and hammering at her breast. The pro- 
prietor of the place, evidently used to such occur- 
rences, shot across the floor and unbarred one of the 
doors, toward which the Mexican was dragging her 
victim. She seemed to know exactly what she was 
doing, despite her towering rage. Five feet from 
the portal she flung the girl from her, the poor thing 
bleeding at the mouth and almost insensible. The 
girl fell in the doorway, gleaming blood, a scarlet 
pattern on her colorless cheek. Before she could 
drag herself across the threshold, the Amazon had 
kicked her violently half a dozen times. Instantly 
the proprietor slammed the door and with perfect 
nonchalance shoved the passionate victor back and 
motioned the orchestra to begin again. 

The cause of this disturbance, the little cow-boy, 
had been lounging sulkily by the bar during the 
battle, and the woman now turned back to him. 
With an angry word or two, she caught him by the 
waist and whirled him out on the floor, to dance. 
Three or four couples followed them, and the episode 
was over, but it took the taste for gayety away 
from me. I gave my ‘‘dancing fool’’ a coin with 
which to buy herself another drink and made for 
the back door. Outside, my companions joined me, 
both a little sickened by such an exhibition of bru- | 
tality. We were quite ready to callit an evening. 


NIGHT LIFE 157 


The moon was just setting, and all Monte lay 
spread out below us, the twinkling lamps of the 
houses looking like the riding lights of a great fleet 
of boats in some harbor beneath. While my com- 
panions went on ahead, I stopped to gaze at the 
beauty of it, forgetting the inadvisability of re- 
maining alone in the place at night. When at last 
I started after them I was reminded of it quite 
forcibly, for I had not gone a dozen paces before 
I was halted by a dark figure which sprang up before 
me, materializing, as it were, from nothing. I mur- 
mured a salutation and was about to pass on, when 
I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder which turned 
me about until I looked into the muzzle of a re- 
volver. 

It happened so exactly as it would have in a 
story-book that I didn’t take it quite seriously; 
every one has looked down the muzzles of revolvers 
since he could first read of adventure. The man be- 
hind this particular gun—for I saw that he was 
alone—had his hat pulled far down over his eyes 
and, with his free hand, he held his blanket-like 
cape drawn up across his mouth. He did not speak 
a word, but I gathered his intentions. I realized, 
at last, that he meant business. 

Many men, including myself, have had theories as 
to what they would do in such circumstances, but I 
-have a feeling that most of them would do as I 


| 


158 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


did. I took my change purse from my pocket and 
turned it over to him, hoping he would investigate 
no farther. My motion saved me, for when I held 
out the money he let drop his cape from his face to 
reach for it and I saw before me none other than 
my old friend, Angel Solis! At the same time he 
recognized me, and, with a grunt of surprise, pulled 
his hand back. He made a stab at getting control 
of the situation, stammering, ‘‘What can you ex- 
pect, sefor, with a great hungry family to feed?’’ 
And then, seeing that this did not seem to move 
me: ‘‘Ten thousand pardons that it should have 
been you; we will have no more of this,’’ putting 
his gun back in a holster at his side; ‘‘but come and 
drink with me!’’ 

Considering where we still were, I thought it 
a little injudicious to refuse, and so my late captor 
and I went down the hill, arm in arm, while he 
apologized again and again for his carelessness in 
not recognizing me. I am afraid he was under the 
influence of alcohol that night, because the next day, 
in the mine, he was most ashamed and for a whole 
week accomplished a prodigious amount of work. 

The excitements of night life proved by far the 
most engaging side of Monte; for though I never 
again visited the ‘‘little house across the way,’’ I 
had yet to experience my first street fair. 

We were discussing the phases of civilization, one 


NIGHT LIFE 159 


evening, when I propounded the theory to Don 
Stewart that one of the chief evidences of culture 
was the development of complicated systems for the 
dispensation of charity, and a resultant hypocrisy 
in giving great balls and fairs, ostensibly to raise 
money, but actually to curb the growing ennui of 
an effete society. 

‘‘If that is the case,’’ he replied, ‘‘we are living 
in a most enlightened community. I’d take you 
down to one of the charity bazaars in the valley to 
prove it, if it weren’t worth your life to get back 
without leaving half a month’s salary behind.’’ 

‘We go, then,’’ said I, ‘‘because if any one in the 
world is hardened to the seductive solicitations of 
young beauties campaigning for a charity they know 
nothing about and care far less, then Iam he! You 
don’t realize I’ve weathered a dozen winters in 
New York!”’ 

Looking back, I think Don was rather mean about 
it: he made me back my opinion by betting him ten 
dollars that I could take as many pesos in my pocket 
and come back to camp with some part of the ten 
still in my possession. However, I was very con- 
fident, and the next Saturday evening my Scotch 
friend and I set out to make the test. 

The fair-ground was the little concrete plaza—a 
very gay sight as we made our way down. All about 
the circle stood tiny booths draped with cheese-cloth 






160 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


and decorated in gaudy colors. From the top of 
each booth strings of electric lights ran up to the 
pinnacle of the band stand in the center, like spokes 
of a brightly colored wheel. A lively orchestra was 
playing, and the crowd, which was dense, was danc- 
ing on the concrete about it. The Mexicans have a 
peculiar custom at their dances. The music never 
stops, and the couples dance several times around, 
then, tiring, continue to circle about the band, walk- 
ing arm inarm. When they feel like dancing again, 
they are still on the floor and have but to fall into 
each other’s arms and go waltzing off. The result 
is that at a dance half the couples are tripping the 
light fantastic toe while the other half, side by 
side with them, are walking solemnly around as if 
they were on parade or at a funeral. No one ever 
sits down except in the stag line. 

At the first glance, my bet seemed safe enough: 
there was no admittance charge, and as the booths 
displayed only tamales and enchiladas and consid- 
erably used articles of clothing, I felt I could easily 
resist the wiles of the hawkers, although they were 
almost as efficient as the genuine article at Coney 
Island. Besides, I was highly entertained by the 
gayety of it all; there is no crowd in the world that 
can enjoy itself as thoroughly as a Latin crowd, 
care-free and pleasure bent. I voiced my confidence 
to my companion, but he only smiled. 





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THE DIVIDING LINE 


The path before the offices which separates the Mexican town below from the 
American Colony above 





‘THE AMERICAN CLUB’’ 


NIGHT LIFE 161 


My Waterloo was not long in coming, for we had 
hardly stepped into the circle when we were beset. 
A rather attractive girl in a short black skirt, riding- 
boots that came to her knees, and a silk shirt open 
at the neck, suddenly stepped out in front of us. 
She had two cartridge-belts crossed over her hips, 
a big forty-five revolver suspended from each, and 
she stood square in our path with her feet apart 
and her delicate fingers playing with the butts of 
the weapons. 

“‘Venga con migo, senor!’’ (‘‘Come with me, 
sir!’’) She frowned severely. I didn’t quite un- 
derstand, but Don looked very much worried, and 
told me I had been arrested. The girl led the way 
across the circle and drew me up before one of the 
booths, in which sat an old man with a white beard, 
who held a little hammer in one hand. There was 
a rapid exchange of remarks between him and the 
girl, and he finally announced: ‘‘Two pesos, senor, 
for disturbing the peace!”’ 

‘“‘But what, in Heaven’s name, have I done? 
Why, you can’t ar—”’ 

‘Another peso, senor, for contempt of court. 
You would, perhaps, prefer the jail?’’ I paid him 
the three pesos in a hurry, and the fair policewoman, 
spying a new victim, dashed off, saying: 

‘‘You may dance with me when I have arrested 
this man!’’ 


162 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


Don then played a contemptible trick: he disap- 
peared, behind my back, into the crowd and left 
me without a friend, in what I was beginning to 
suspect was a den of thieves. Well, I had been at 
the fair and still had seven pesos left, so, there hav- 
ing been no time limit specified, I waived the chances 
of dancing with the guardian of the law, and started 
to go. 

As I turned about, one of the most beautiful girls 
I have ever seen came running up to me and grasped 
me by the arm. I had it on the tip of my tongue 
to shout, ‘‘I want nothing, thank you!”’ very firmly, 
but she gave me no chance; she hurried me one side 
and stood on tiptoe to whisper in my ear. Unfor- 
tunately, I did not understand her at first, but she 
stamped her foot and repeated the speech, hissing 
it for emphasis. At last I gathered the missing 
words and realized that the girl had done nothing 
less than ask me to marry her! I demanded of her 
if that was what she meant. 

‘¢Si, sefor, si!’’ with the most adoringly suppli- 
cating look in her eyes. 

‘“‘No!’’ I growled, somewhat at a loss, ‘‘I can’t 
marry you—I haven’t time!’’ 

‘*Ah, mi amor! not even once?’’ and before I 
could gather my scattered wits she had snapped her 
fingers and a tall, lanky youth in the garb of a 
clergyman approached, carrying an open prayer- 


NIGHT LIFE 163 


book and beaming with smiles. My newly acquired 
fiancée took a ring from a chain around her neck 
and slipped it on her finger and, giving me no time 
to object, took my hand in hers and stood in front 
of the minister. Dancers and promenaders swept 
by us unmindful, hawkers shouted, lights glared, and 
without Don to rescue me I was swept by Fate into 
this mysterious union. The man before us shot 
through a singsong chant, snapped the prayer-book 
shut, and held out his hand. 

‘“T'wo pesos, please!’’ Hypnotized, I reached into 
my pocket and pulled out the coins, and my lovely 
wife held up her face to be kissed. 

I undoubtedly started my married career on a 
wrong tack, because instead of embracing her I 
stood still and said, ‘‘Now, see here—’’ Never 
having married a Mexican before, I was a little sur- 
prised at the result, for her eyes suddenly flashed 
and with her heels she beat a rapid tattoo on the con- 
crete pavement. I was under the impression that 
she was calling me a brute, but I could n’t be sure. 
When the tantrum had subsided, she took my arm 
again, but without the original tenderness, and lit- 
erally ran me through the crowd of dancers, to a 
stall in the far corner labeled in large letters: 
DIVORCIO. 

Two men stood here, with a big book open before 
them in which one was making notations. I spotted 


164 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


the ‘‘frame-up’’ and stopped my companion. As 
well as I could, I explained in Spanish that I had n’t 
wanted to marry her, but since she had insisted and 
I had done the only gentlemanly thing to do in the 
circumstances, I certainly was not going to divorce 
her at this stage of the game. My wife she was, and 
my wife she ’d stay. Then, quite satisfied with my- 
self, -I started to walk off. 

With a wild scream, the girl grabbed me by the 
coat tail. Everybody about us stopped dancing and 
began to laugh; I could feel the crimson coming out 
in my face and neck and noticed the officer who had 
arrested me before, making her way toward us. The 
jig was up. 

‘‘Take your darn divorce!’’ I shouted in English, 
and one of the gentlemen behind the counter, un- 
derstanding my facial expression, if no more, shoved 
a paper into my hand and said politely but unsmil- 
ingly: 

‘‘Wive pesos, please!’’ 

I looked at the girl, but she opened her mouth and 
I saw in her eyes that the scream would be repeated, 
so I opened my wallet and produced my last five 
pesos and handed them over. The veteran of many 
a more portentous battle had fallen at last. 

I turned, a broken man, as my wife danced away, 
taking off her wedding-ring even as she left me— 
to find Don Stewart again at my elbow. He piloted 


NIGHT LIFE 165 


me out at last, but it probably was the luckiest in- 
hibition of his life that he never so much as smiled 
once until we had climbed the whole long hill. By 
that time the exercise had made me a little more 
rational. 


CHAPTER IX 
THE BULL-RING 


THINK our superintendent was prouder of hav- 
ing built the bull-ring than he was of any of 
his achievements underground. There were two or 
three ardent ‘‘fight fans’? among the Mexican offi- 
cials in the office, who had convinced him of the need 
of an arena for the peace of mind of the native popu- 
lation, and he was intensely conceited about his 
work. The bull-ring was a sort of wooden bowl, 
perched on the very top of one of the steepest peaks 
to the east of the camp. There were no other build- 
ings on this particular summit, and, plainly visible 
from the colony, the structure rested on the brow 
of the mountain, like a little white crown on a lonely 
monarch. 
~ When I talked to the designer, I discovered that 
he took more pride in the location than in anything 
else about it. , 
‘It isn’t evident,’’ he told me, ‘‘but it took head 
work to think out that site!’? Since the spot was, 
probably, the most inaccessible in camp, I questioned 


him further. 
166 


THE BULL-RING 167 


‘*Well,’’ he explained, ‘‘suppose I had put it 
in the valley, so that the whole community could 
sit on its front doorstep and look down into the 
arena: where would your gate receipts be? It had 
to be on top of a hill, or we could not have charged 
admission. And then, too,’’ with a wink, ‘‘I ’d rather 
the men slept at home after the fight; and when you 
have been to one, you ’ll realize what a great help 
gravity is to us in handling the crowds!’’ I thought 
this very much the same philosophy that had put 
the ‘‘Alps’’ where they were. 

The fights were held every Sunday, special trains 
of flat-cars, decorated with the national tricolor and 
looking like the observation train at a Yale-Harvard 
boat-race, being run up from the mill-town of Cobre. 
Performances were widely advertised during the 
week, a new company of fighters being imported for 
each occasion. In Mexico the profession of bull- 
fighting is highly organized, and there is a regular 
circuit, as on our vaudeville stage. There are also 
stock companies (an unintentional pun!) which 
spend a season in one town and then move on. The 
bulls used at Monte were local products from near- 
by ranches, and had to be brought to the scene of the 
battle a week before the fight, so exhausting was 
the trip up to the ring. After one climb, I appre- 
ciated the bull’s attitude: there is nothing one feels 
less like doing than fighting, after the ascent. 


168 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


To an American it is well worth while to see at 
least one bull-fight—if only to convince oneself that 
one never wishes to see another. I had purposely 
delayed going until an auspicious occasion, and when 
I finally made my one and only trip it was with a 
very gay company. I had a New York boy and his 
wife visiting me, and as they refused to leave Mexico 
without having witnessed an exhibition of the na- 
tional sport, which they might magnify from a 
distance in recounting their travels, we got up a 
party with the superintendent’s family and a 
débutante from Boston who was staying with them. 
This last member was the finishing touch of correct- 
ness, for in every book on the exiled life of the 
young mining engineer there must be a beautiful 
girl from the East visiting the ‘‘chief,’’ who gains 
her impressions of the great West from Sunday 
rides on horseback and picnics at twilight, on the 
desert. 

Although one could almost have thrown a stone 
across into the pit, we had to start from the colony 
an hour before the opening performance in order 
to get down the hill and up the other side in time. 
‘At Monte, wherever one is going, one must first 
climb down to the bottom of the mountain and then 
up the side of another just as high, and as the alti- 
tude is very great and the air proportionately rare, 
the ascents are made at a snail’s pace, the climber 


THE BULL-RING 169 


dragging one foot after the other, out of breath 
from the start. I think the incessant climbing got 
on men’s nerves as much as any other one thing in 
the life there; when I got back to the deserts of 
Arizona, the level ground felt much as terra firma 
does under one’s feet after a long sea-voyage. 

But if the spirit does not falter, all good climbs 
come to an end, and we finally reached the pride of 
the camp, part of a long winding column of natives 
—men, women, and children—grunting up to their 
national pastime. I had seen several rings, in the 
south of France, at Nimes and elsewhere, but none 
so small as this one proved to be. It wasn’t over 
fifty feet in diameter, an exact circle with a vertical 
stockade of boarding ten feet high. There was only 
one entrance, leading directly into the ring, from 
which one climbed to the seats by ladders; after the 
gates were closed, there was no means of entrance 
or exit until the last bull were killed. To vault the 
back would have meant a drop of several hundred 
feet down the side of the hill. | 

‘‘Choose your own exit and jump—do not run— 
if you want to get killed!’’ a fire-inspector’s sign 
might have read. 

When we arrived, the bowl was already nearly 
full of shouting, half-drunken Mexicans. That pre- 
fix ‘‘half’’ is to distinguish the condition of the 
audience before the battle from the state of intoxica- 


170 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


tion attained by the end of it. We received a rous- 
ing ovation as we walked across the circle to mount 
to our ‘‘ring-side seats.’’ 

It was a wild-looking assemblage: men in the 
gaudiest of varicolored silk shirts (at ten dollars 
apiece, with the family starving), young girls in bril- 
liant enveloping shawls, and fat matrons openly 
suckling their babies as they howled for the killing 
to begin. The more adventurous of the bloods sat 
astride the stockade, one foot hanging inside, to be 
withdrawn as the bull charged their way. The mana- 
ger of the place, a fat old man under several yards 
of sombrero, strode up and down in the center, bel- 
lowing directions and brandishing a hammer with 
which he nailed up the entrance after the fight had 
begun. When the doors were secured, the only 
refuges for the fighters were little blinds, set at 
intervals around the ring, behind which they dodged 
in emergencies. 

We had hardly gotten to our seats when there 
was a fanfare, from one bugler, and, breaking the 
silence that followed, the band, an inevitable adjunct 
to every occasion, struck up the national anthem. 
Impressively the portals were cleared and the pa- 
rade of the fighters entered. In Spain this pro- 
cession 1s a very spectacular affair, but by the time 
it reached Monte it had degenerated into a sort of 
burlesque of the real thing. However, the fighters 


THE BULL-RING 171 


were beautifully arrayed, in regalia that looked as 
if it had been resurrected from an ancient trunk 
full of discarded fancy-dress costumes—all the or- 
thodox gilt and flaming silk but a trifle tarnished. 

First came the matador, the killer (who turned 
out to be a venerable-looking scoundrel of about 
seventy summers), followed by four banderilleros, 
whose function in life is to torment the bull, each 
with a gorgeous cape, the inside of which was an en- 
raging red. Behind these came two horsemen, pica- 
dors, carrying long wooden lances, with a little knife 
like a pointed safety-razor blade struck on the end. 
They entered with a grand flourish, bowing pro- 
foundly, and, having circled the ring, drew up while 
their senescent leader made a long speech enlarging 
on the ancient formula, ‘‘We who are about to die, 
salute thee!’’ 

Then the gates were closed and nailed fast, and 
the fun began. The banderilleros spread out, the 
horsemen having retired for the first inning of the 
game, and the matador, with all the dignity of his 
station and his years, drew in behind a blind and took 
a generous swig from a bottle of tequila passed down 
to him by an admiring spectator. This reinforce- 
ment from the gallery was repeated at intervals 
throughout the afternoon. Then a second fanfare, 
and a panel in the side of the arena opened and a 
bull emerged, evidently encouraged from the rear. 


172 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


He was almost anything but a fighter, that first 
bull; he trotted obediently out in the middle of the 
inclosure, looked stupidly around, and closed his 
eyes. I think he had not had enough sleep the night 
before. One after another the tormentors ap- 
proached him with elaborate caution and whisked 
their red capes in front of his nodding head. He 
opened one eye, but red was just as good a color 
as any other to that animal! At last the mob began 
to cry for more and better fighting, and one of the 
banderilleros was handed down two banderillas and 
instructed to start something. 

The banderilla is a wooden stick about two feet 
long, decorated with paper frilling such as some- 
times ornaments the harmless mutton-chop, and 
pointed with a wicked steel barb, about an inch long, 
sharpened to a razor edge. The correct banderillero, 
having bowed all around, takes his place in the cen- 
ter of the ring, grasps one instrument in each hand, 
and, holding his arms out above his head in a sort 
of Y, faces the bull. The brute should then charge 
him, the man standing perfectly still until the bull’s 
horns are literally in his stomach. Then, reaching 
over the approaching horns, he plunges the darts into 
the animal’s shoulders, with lightning rapidity. 
With the sudden pain, the bull will rear straight up 
and go wild with fury, having been diverted from 


THE BULL-RING 173 


the man when the latter was not more than a few 
inches from destruction. 

This particular bull, however, showed no incli- 
nation to charge, and could not be induced to move, 
so the poor fighter had to walk up to him, badly 
spoiling his pose, and jab him in the sides with the 
knives. This produced some action, but the animal 
appeared more annoyed than aroused, and the affair 
was such an anticlimax that the band began to play 
to divert the crowd. The ruse, however, was not 
successful, for a great chorus of protests arose, 
led by the village joker’s sally: ‘‘You can’t kill him 
with music!’’ and several people declared the ani- 
mal to be their lost cow. 

So at last, amid much shrugging of shoulders on 
the performers’ part, the panel was again opened 
and the bull, showing his first signs of life for the 
afternoon, trotted happily back to his stall. There 
were to be six bulls killed, and the first four were 
in the nature of preliminaries. Unless they showed 
some fire they were returned uninjured, in hopes 
that less food and more rest might bring them vigor 
for the next week. The happy fate of these animals 
as long as they remained pacific is something mili- 
tarists should think about, but it must be assumed 
that the bulls had thick enough skins not to mind the 
insults. 


174 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


But the fifth bull did all that was expected of 
him. Encouraged by the ease of their first conquests 
(and by repeated doses from borrowed bottles), the 
second-rate troupe began to put a few frills into the 
business. Technical excellence demands that one 
man stand alone in the center of the ring when the 
bull is let in. The animal will charge straight for 
him, immediately, but if the man remains perfectly 
still the animal will be puzzled and stop, just short, 
to investigate. Should the man move the least lit- 
tle bit, however, all is lost. Good trick performers 
kneel or stand on their heads as an opening card, 
and on this oceasion—probably because it required 
less sense of balance—our local artist took the 
former pose, alone out there in the ‘‘great open 
spaces.’’ 

I was interested to see for myself what the bull’s 
reaction to this would be, because I felt that assur- 
ance of ‘‘safety in statuary’’ might be useful to one 
pursued—say on the golf-course—by some wander- 
ing bull. But I suppose I shall never know whether 
an ordinary bull would stop or not. For this one 
came out of its corner (to use a boxing expression) 
like a maniac, took one glance around, and made for 
the kneeling figure, at a gallop. The hero, however, 
was much too quick a thinker to be caught: he real- 
ized at once that this bull was not of the same breed 
as those that had gone before. When the animal 


THE BULL-RING 175 


was half-way across the arena, the man showed ex- 
cellent judgment: he ieaped to his feet and ran. 
And then, mind you, with the bull pawing the ground 
in absolute possession of the field, the fellow had 
the monumental nerve to peep out from behind the 
blind and bow his acknowledgment of the crowd’s 
appreciation of his bravery! 

The troupe went through the whole performance 
with that bull, and every one but the picador met 
with defeat. Why the banderillero was not killed, 
no one knows. He stood up most determinedly, 
reeling only a little from drink, and made a very 
pretty stab, but unfortunately he stopped, in the 
middle of the ring, to take off his hat. The darts 
diverted the beast for only about thirty seconds, 
and the man’s performance was scheduled to last 
much longer than that. He was still bowing when, 
out of the corner of his eye, he saw the bull turn 
after him. He also took to his heels, but so sudden 
was his terror that he lost his sense of direction and 
ran—bang!—into the bare side of the wall. Apis 
looked at him a minute, lowered his horns and, with 
a horrible bellow, got under way again. The man 
spread-eagled against the wall, looking like a gaudy 
carpet tacked up for a beating, clawing vainly at 
the smooth surface. Two men above saved him. 
With considerable presence of mind they reached 
down and, grabbing his waving arms, heaved him 


176 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


up. The bull’s horns, flying skyward in a big sweep, 
scraped the sides of his shins! 

Until now the performance had been a joke. I 
reproached myself for not having been to more 
fights, they were so entertaining. But at this stage 
it was decided that here was a bull worthy of the 
picador and, at a long blast from the trumpet, the 
main gate opened just wide enough to permit the 
man and steed to squeeze through. The spirit of the 
drama changed utterly. The horse was a hideous 
starved creature, scarred from half a dozen battles, 
and the panic which was shown in all his movements 
was suppressed only by the firm knees and silver 
spurs of the man astride him. There was something 
the matter with his head, but I did not understand 
until the superintendent whispered an explanation. 
In Spain the horses are blindfolded; here, to save 
the bother, one eye had been put out with a white- 
hot branding iron. Somehow the memory of the 
torture was engraved in the creature’s remaining 
eye, always turned from the bull by the picador. 

The man himself was young and rather dashing, 
with more daring than all the rest put together, but 
nothing could make up for the scene which ensued. 
First enraged with darts, repeatedly buried in its 
side and pulled out, until its flanks were covered 
with blood, the bull was attacked by the horseman. 
The picador had a perfect seat, standing in his stir- 





ENTER THE IDOLS OF THE TOWN 





THE PICADOR SCORES 





THE BULL-RING 177 


rups with leveled lance until the charging animal 
was almost upon him, then driving the blade into 
the beast’s side and dropping into his saddle as 
the momentum of the attack sent horse and rider 
reeling back, until the torture was too much and the 
bull reared away in agony. Once or twice the man 
missed a clean hit and the monster went plunging 
on, throwing his opponents against the barricade 
and weaving his horns back and forth, gashing the 
horse’s side. The picador, whose leg was heavily 
padded (while the horse was without armor), then 
kicked his boot free of the stirrup and, rising on the 
other foot, jabbed again and again—short, brutal 
blows—while the banderilleros attempted, with their 
capes, to divert the raging animal. 

The crowd shrieked with delight, men pulling 
their hats off, waving them in the air, and throwing 
coins into the arena, and women shouting and tear- 
ing at one another in their excitement. I saw a 
mother snatch her baby from her breast and, in a 
frenzy, shake the infant in the air. The whole 
scene was in horrible contrast to the ridiculous slap- 
stick comedy that had preceded it. The horse, one 
side slashed wide open and pouring blood, sank to 
its knees, trembling, and while the banderilleros 
made desperate efforts to distract the bull, the pica- 
dor dismounted and literally dragged his pitiful 
steed up and to the door, through which, as it 


178 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


opened, the poor creature half fell to safety and a 
week’s respite before its next torture. 

The aged matador stepped forward to end the 
fight. Watching the bull carefully with his wicked 
little eyes, he made a speech, telling the crowd that 
he was about to risk his life for ‘‘the entertainment 
of Monte and the glory of Mexico’’! Then he drew, 
from under a dark-red scarf, a long, straight rapier 
and crept out to the center of the ring. For all his 
years, the old blackguard was skilful. There is a 
tremendous knack in the killing: the bull must be 
moving toward the matador, with its head down, 
and the man must reach across the horns and sink 
the blade in a space only a few inches wide, between 
the animal’s shoulders. 

The bull came on, a magnificent sight, head low- 
ered, slowly at first, bellowing, and pawing the 
ground with sweeps that sent clouds of sand up be- 
hind him; and then, gradually gaining speed, he 
thundered down upon the old man. The final gesture 
was so quick the eye could hardly follow it: a flash 
of steel in the sunlight, a lurch, and the charging 
beast stopped dead in its tracks. Then the killer 
turned and, wiping the blood from his weapon, 
bowed solemnly and began to wander about the ring 
picking up the coins the rabble had thrown. 

The bull stood quite still for a moment; then he 
began to wave his head slowly from side to side as 


THE BULL-RING 179 


if trying to understand just what it was that had 
been done to him. He gave a hollow echo of his old 
bellow and feebly pawed the ground. Finally, first 
one leg and then another bent at the knee and he 
went down, blood oozing from the wounds in his 
back. His tongue came out and his eyes slowly 
glazed. On the ground he gave one weak shiver and, 
with a last heave of his flank, died—game to the very 
end; ‘‘framed’’ in his last and most splendid battle. 

An overwhelming emotion struck me; I wanted 
to leap out of my seat, vault the railing, and fly at 
the tottering villain and wring his neck. I wanted 
to go into that arena and fight, with my bare fists, the 
whole crowd of cringing, salaaming cowards. They 
wanted to see a fight. Well, I wanted to show them 
a real one—no battle where half a dozen armed men 
tackled a dumb beast whose every move they could 
anticipate, but one where men stood up against men 
and the best fighter won. That bull seemed to me, 
lying there in his own blood, so infinitely much bet- 
ter than the whole reeking bunch of them that I felt 
he had won and not they, despite their drunken 
smiles and groveling in the dust for the silver that 
was thrown to them by their fellow-brutes! 

No one who has not witnessed a bull-fight can 
realize the sordidness of the spectacle at its cheap- 
est. It is overpowering. My friend’s wife, who is 
not given to weeping, was in tears, pleading to be 


180 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


taken away, but there was no escaping until the last 
bull was brought in. Perhaps if they had killed all 
six of the animals, we should have gotten used to 
the brutality of the performance, but I hope not. 
In the midst of these reflections, what was my sur- 
prise to hear a voice breathing rapturously in my 
ear: 

‘‘Tt was wonderful! But I want to see a really 
good one!’’ 

I turned to find in this enthusiast none other than 
the little débutante from Boston! Her eyes were 
shining in a horrible way, and she was all athrill 
with what she had seen. It certainly takes a great 
many temperaments to make up a world—even an 
Anglo-Saxon one! 

But I had little time to think, for once more the 
notes of the bugle split the air, and again the wooden 
gate opened to let in a new animal to be tortured. 
He trotted out over the pool of darkened blood which 
was all that remained to tell of his brother’s glorious 
stand. 

Again the ponderous posing, again the narrow 
escapes,—of drunkenness, not of courage,—and 
again a magnificent animal was about to be slain. 
But this time some local god with a sense of humor 
(and perhaps of shame) interposed. 

The last bull had been as wild as his dead com- 
rade and the brave toreadors as afraid of him, 


THE BULL-RING 181 


when diversion came. In the arena, where the pro- 
fessionals dared not tarry more than a few seconds, 
appeared an amateur who put them all to shame. 
He was an old cow-man who could have matched the 
ancient matador in years, and his hair and a flowing 
beard were snowy white. But his spirit was young 
and he vaulted the stockade, tumbling down upon 
the field like a boy. The spectators were too intoxi- 
cated to be afraid for him: they cheered. He showed 
he was no bull-fighter by not even bowing to them. 
Instead, he went right up to the bull, which, goaded 
and bleeding, was pawing the ground with rage. 
Then, while half a dozen of the should-be warriors 
peeked out from behind their safe blinds, he had 
the audacity to seize the infuriated monster by the 
horns. The cheering subsided into a hollow gasp. 
I shut my eyes and saw in my imagination the broken 
and twisted remains of the foolish old man whom 
no one had had sense enough to stop. 

When I opened my eyes again, bull and man, 
both, were on the ground. With one superhuman 
twist the cow-man had turned the animal’s nose 
straight up into the air and tossed him off his bal- 
ance. And now he sat upon the ‘‘terror of the 
toreadors’’ and grinned idiotically up at the sur- 
prised audience. In some trick way he had that 
animal so that it could not move. It was almost 
worth the whole afternoon to see the expressions 


182 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


of the professionals as they came out and viewed 
the phenomenon. 

It broke the bull’s spirit, too. The old joker had 
spoilt the afternoon for any more serious bull-fight- 
ing. After his ruthless exposure of the relative 
strength of man and animal there was nothing 
left but to call it a day. We stumbled down the 
side of the mountain, exhausted by the violence of 
the two hours’ emotions. 

If the humor could only have drowned the mem- 
ory of the butchery! But it made it the more ter- 
rible in retrospect. No: my débutante friend may 
want more, but for me never again, not even once! 


CHAPTER X 
A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 


N camp, my foreman and I had a regular rit- 
ual which we went through every morning, run- 
ning roughly thus: 

‘¢And what day is this?’’ 

‘*Monday.’’ 

‘‘And how many days to Saturday?”’ 

‘¢Wive.’’ 

‘‘Good Lord! that ’s too many!”’ 

And so on through the week, until on Saturday 
morning the answer was: 

‘‘Thank Heaven; make it so!”’ 

For on Saturday night only the devil cared how 
long we played poker, and on Sunday we could carry 
on with our work of interpreting the life of a min- 
ing engineer as depicted in all standard works of 
fiction. 

Unfortunately, Sinclair Lewis and the other real- 
ists have neglected to give us their idea of what an 
engineer might be like, but the consensus of opinion 
of all romanticists points to a young Apollo of 
bronzed complexion and swaggering walk, clothed 

183 


184 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


in riding-breeches of English cut, spotless (except 
for the picturesque coating of dust after the day’s 
- gallop) riding-boots with shiny spurs, and a Stet- 
son hat cocked at a jaunty angle. This attractive 
individual has no routine work whatever to do, and 
is associated with his job—a gigantic undertaking 
which goes its inspiring way unaided by the hero— 
only in moments of crisis, when he rushes in, six- 
shooter in hand (did I neglect to say that he always 
did his swaggering with a forty-five at his side?), 
and, with a few well chosen words, saves the whole 
business from ruin, relying on his own inherent abil- 
ity to dominate the rest of mankind, and the great 
loyalty with which the said mankind repays his lead- 
ership, to pull him through. , 

With the exception of these high spots, which 
usually come in the tenth chapter, his life is spent 
riding across limitless plains and over insurmounta- 
ble mountains on his trusty steed (a fiery Arabian 
mount, as loyal to him as are his men), and waiting 
for the heroine, who arrives in a private car just. 
before the crisis, and whose nose is brought down 
from the high altitude to which it had ascended on 
meeting such a rough-and-ready gentleman, by her 
unbounded admiration of his manliness in handling 
the situation. His evenings, during the first nine 
chapters, have been spent cutting pictures of this 
lady out of the Sunday supplements of New York 





JD AT THE NOLANS’ RANCH 


JOURNEY’S E 





= 


Pad 


waves me 
on 


mi er 
a2 78 § lou bE 





A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 185 


papers, in which his supplies from the States have 
come wrapped. These cuttings he secretes in the 
back of his watch, under the blotter on his desk, and, 
in fact, in every nook and corner of his gigantic 
estancia, so that, no matter what he does, he is con- 
stantly coming upon likenesses of his employer’s 
daughter, whom he realizes his labors are support- 
ing while her father sits idly smoking a Corona- 
Corona and toying with a ticker-tape in his draw- 
ing-room office on Wall Street. 

Once the crisis is past, for the rest of the book 
this hero rides his Arabian firebrand, which instinct- 
tively feels its master’s despair at being refused by 
the lady and saves the dead-locked situation by bit- 
ing her horse until it runs away and then overtaking 
it and allowing the young man to lift the fair capi- 
talist from the saddle as her steed is about to plunge 
into a bottomless canon. Her life saved thus, the 
girl can do no less than marry the hard-working boy, 
but some of the sting of the dénouement is removed 
by the discovery that, all along, she has subcon- 
sciously been looking for an excuse to succumb. 

As we obtained our Sunday supplements by the 
uninteresting medium of the daily mail, it was, of 
course, impossible for us to build up much romance 
on gleanings therefrom, but we could at least get 
ourselves up in the costume and on horseback, and 
there were plenty of ‘‘insurmountable mountains’’ 


186 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


for us to practise on. So, often on Sunday we would 
have one of our ‘‘loyal workmen’”’ send up some 
horses upon which we set forth in search of 
adventure. 

Early in my stay I had been advised to procure 
some sort of revolver, and I had sent for my Ger- 
man lugger, feeling that at last I was to get color 
for a real story of adventure. I found, however, 
that there was a bit of irony connected with ‘‘pack- 
ing a shooter.’’ True, it is not safe to travel far 
from camp without a weapon, but the catch comes 
in the fact that one must not use it. Any one who 
is obviously unarmed is at the mercy of the first 
drunken Mexican who develops a complex about 
‘‘oringos,’’ but if the Mexican attacks, and one pro- 
duces a concealed weapon and defends oneself, the 
next few years will, in all probability, be spent in 
a stinking dungeon, waiting for somebody to re- 
member that Mexico is a free republic and that.a 
man has a right to a trial. And even supposing this 
has been survived, one will be no asset thereafter 
to any well-regulated insurance company. How- 
ever, if the Mexican shoots first (and accurately), 
he is at a distinct advantage, because he is used 
to living in places like the carcel and always has the 
chance of finding the door open and himself cut off 
from the comfort of being supported by the state. 

So the solution left me was to get as big a gun 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 187 


as possible, carry it in the most. conspicuous place, 
and look as if I would use it on the first occasion. 
Then I had a fair guarantee that no one would make 
an issue of it. 

The longest trip we took was a twenty-four-mile 
ride over the mountains to carry some ammunition 
to an American rancher who was a friend of Don 
Stewart’s. We took with us a taciturn individual 
who headed the supply department and was known 
as ‘‘Lee’’ and contracted for two reliable (if not 
Arabian) horses and one mule. 

We started out at sunrise, heading east from the 
camp, gotten up in our finest, with flapping revol- 
vers, jangling spurs, and saddle-bags loaded with 
bottled beer. ‘The trail we were to follow was 
a through highway to the river, the only connecting 
link between the Mexican town there and Monte and 
Cobre. It looked less like a highway than anything 
I could imagine, but was typical of the trails in that 
part of the country. Hardly two feet wide, scratched 
into the sides of the mountains, around which it 
crawled, it opened up a new vista at each twist. 
For several miles it wandered in and out and finally 
came abruptly to the foot of an enormous peak and 
apparently ended. Don, astride the mule, was in the 
lead, and I saw the plucky little animal attack that 
big brute of a mountain without a second’s hesita- 
tion. It started almost straight up the side, follow- 


188 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


ing a suggestion of a zigzag trail, but at an angle of 
well over forty-five degrees. Now, I had learned to 
ride on polo ponies, and in their way they are pretty 
dextrous, but I knew what they were good for and I 
knew that that mountain would have finished them. 
How, then, could this long, lanky sketch of a horse 

of mine ever make the grade? 

Fortunately, I did not stop to discuss the matter, 
because in the next few minutes I made a discovery. 
My horse was a cross between an elevator and a 
fly and traveled as easily straight up into the air 
as on the level. I found myself sitting on the-back 
of my Mexican saddle, upright, but with my body 
absolutely parallel with the horse’s back. Moreover, 
I glanced down at the trail and perceived that -all 
semblance of order had gone from it and that it 
was a bed of loose stone, so that at every,step the 
animal dislodged a young land-slide—but still kept 
plowing away, lifting me momentarily higher, until 
the valley we had left became no more than a tiny — 
indentation in the earth’s surface. 

At the top of the climb I had a glorious surprise 
in store for me. The trail came out on a saddle which 
divided the mountainous desert, in the center of 
which the camp was situated, from the basin through 
which the river ran. Standing on this ridge, I looked 
behind me at the country in which I had discovered 
Monte, and then turned to gaze ahead over what 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 189 


might have been a representation of Paradise: a 
long, winding valley, its sides rich with waving green 
trees, a gleam here and there through the foliage 
at the bottom, where the sunlight caught the stream 
that trickled down the center—all under a cloud- 
less sky of deepest azure. From this distance the 
whole valley appeared to be carpeted with the soft- 
est of fresh green, in vivid contrast to the arid sur- 
face of the land we had just left. 

We paused a minute to rest the horses and marvel 
at the beauty of the view, and then descended into 
the valley, which went under the pleasant title of 
“‘Vourtud Caiion,’’ the Cation of Virtue. My eleva- 
tor-horse was as good at going down hill as up, and 
eantered down amid the flying rocks without a single 
misstep. Midway of the descent I dropped a little 
leather whip I had with me, and, dismounting to 
climb back a few feet for it, I found I could hardly 
walk, so treacherous was the ground. For every 
step up, it seemed I slipped back two! And yet the 
horse, with me on its back, could travel over that 
same deceptive ground and never hesitate or falter. 
Of horses as well as men there are many kinds! 

The descent into the valley disclosed the fact that 
the softness apparent from the summit was an il- 
lusion bred of distance, for the ground was dry and 
cracked; but trees there were, and a brook wander- 
ing back and forth across the flat arroyo bed. De- 


190 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


void of underbrush but spotted with pleasant shade- 
trees, the little valley had the air of a deserted park. 
At every turn, I expected to come upon nurses and 
perambulators. 

The sight of the trees was in itself gratifying, for 
we never realize how much their foliage is a part of 
our satisfaction with life until we live a while 
without them. The meeting of such childhood ac- 
quaintances once more is like renewing old friend- 
ships. There was the most extraordinary combina- 
tions of species, too; in this promised land all were 
friends, for two tall trees guarded the entrance 
to one part, on one side a stately pine and on the 
other a graceful palm—the representatives of two 
worlds come hither to this quiet corner to meet in 
conference. 

Such musings were, however, hardly in order, be- 
cause at the time I was enjoying what are familiarly 
known as the ‘‘tortures of the damned.’’ Never hav- 
ing ridden in a Mexican saddle before, I had not 
thought it necessary to inquire of the man from 
whom I had gotten the outfit whether or not the 
thing would fit me; I was n’t used to being fitted for 
my saddle. The one I had acquired was a heavy 
leather thing with high back and the conventional 
bucking-board square across the front under the 
pommel. The distance between these two immovable 
bulwarks was just ten inches. I could get down 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 191 


into it all right, but it held me as in a vise, with the 
corners of the front board biting into my legs. 

The first few miles this seat was uncomfortable, 
the next distinctly painful, and thereafter almost 
unendurable; and most of the time from then on 
I had to ride standing up, like a heroic statue of a 
general leading his troops. I dwell on my experience 
as a warning to any unsuspecting equestrian who 
may meet this device of the Inquisition, which might 
be called the ‘‘leather maiden’’—as painful as 
the old iron one. It is also interesting that the ride 
through the cafion was so fascinating that it actually 
did lift me above the physical pain, or at least so 
it seems in memory, looking back on it from the 
soft retreat of a comfortable desk-chair. 

In the whole twenty-four miles, we passed but one 
sign of life, a half-dozen Mexicans camped amid the 
rusty wreckage of a deserted mine. Abandoned by 
the corporation which operated Monte, this mine 
still contained rock enough to furnish.a living to a 
few miners, who worked it entirely by hand, packing 
the ore out on their backs. 

The canon continued to be exceptionally beautiful, 
its walls now rolling mountain-sides, now steep cliffs 
of brick-red rock, glowing faintly in their naked- 
ness. At one place the sides arched together over 
the stream and we rode for a quarter of a mile 
through a giant cave, several hundred feet high, 


192 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


the clatter of our horses’ hoofs awakening hollow 
echoes. 

Late in the afternoon, when my physical discom- 
fort was rapidly gaining on my esthetic apprecia- 
tion, and when I had begun to see, in every clump 
of bushes, houses that might be our goal and put 
an end to my misery, we finally rounded a spur 
and came out on a broad plain which sloped down 
to the river beyond. Nestled under the mountains, 
as if seeking their protection, we found the ranch. 

It consisted of a knocked-together house hiding 
under a thick coat of some clinging vine, a thatched 
out-building, and a frame stable in the corral, where 
a dozen horses circled idly about. We-rode in, and 
I had my initiation in the etiquette of calling at 
a ranch a-horseback. A long wooden railing ran 
along the front of the stable, three or four feet above 
the ground, and, watching to discover what the 
Romans did, that I might do likewise, I found this 
rail to be the key to the situation. One must ride 
alongside it, dismount, and take off saddle and blan- 
kets and place them on the rail. Then one lets one’s 
horse loose to play with the others and goes about 
one’s business. It is as much a matter of course as 
ringing the door-bell of.a town house. 

When I had manceuvered my way through this 
procedure, not without some question in my mind 
as to how I was to capture my animal again, our 


Tae Lioaay 
Peeters 
RvR OF eos 





one 





VIRTUD CANON 
Don and Lee pause to admire a bit of light and shade on a Sunday’s adventure 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 193 


host appeared and welcomed us. He was a midget 
of a man, burnt black, with his legs in the prettiest 
bow, and he spoke in the slowest of drawls, with a 
total lack of humor. 

We had not eaten anything all day. Of course we 
were not expected, and without comment the rancher, 
whose name was Malone, led us to where a table and 
bench stood under a huge oak-tree. There was a 
prodigious bustling in the main house, and through 
the open door I saw a trunk dragged out of one 
corner and opened, and something fished out from 
the bottom. The object turned out to be a white-silk 
table-cloth, heavily embroidered, probably worth 
hundreds of dollars in the States. This was spread 
on the board table in our honor (and despite our pro- 
tests), and presently an elderly Mexican woman 
with a kindly, smiling face appeared, laden down 
with food. With the beer, rescued from the saddle- 
bags and cooled in a spring back of the house, a 
feast was made. 

The Mexican woman was Mrs. Malone, and after 
| dinner she and her husband escorted us to a thatched 
building which proved a sort of permanent summer- 
house, in which they slept. We talked for several 
hours, Malone puffing the American cigarettes we 
gave him, just as fast as he could draw breath. Al- 
though we presented him with the two packages we 
had with us, he must have smoked the forty while 


194 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


we were still with him, so great was his smoke- 
appetite after his own home-made cigarettes. Be- 
tween puffs I tried to get some story of his life and 
how he lived so far from civilization, for he made 
trips so lengthy as that to Monte and Cobre only 
every six or eight months. 

His life was an exceedingly full one, for he had 
several hundred Mexicans working for him all over 
the country-side. One gang was running a mine on 
a lease from the company, another was lumbering, 
cutting the scraggly little trees, hardly taller than 
a man, to be used for ‘‘lagging’’ in the mine at 
Monte. He collected mineral specimens to ship to 
the United States, had a large herd of cattle on 
the range, bred horses, gardened and carpentered, 
and was a great sportsman. His half-breed son, an 
ungainly, stupid-looking hulk of humanity, did most 
of the work, and so the elder Malone devoted his 
time to hunting and fishing. The ammunition we 
brought him was for a forty-five revolver and I had 
imagined it to be for self-protection, but what was 
my surprise when he told us that with the weapon 
he kept the ranch supplied with deer meat, shooting 
from the saddle up to one hundred yards. I refused 
to believe it, but the statement was corroborated 
afterward by men who had been with him! Fishing 
he was even more enthusiastic about, but he had 
his own ideas of sport. 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 195 


‘“‘T can’t see,’’ he drawled, ‘‘how these fellers get 
any real enjoyment out of fishin’ with a hook. It 
don’t seem like it was a real game!’’ I asked him 
what he considered the correct technique. ‘‘ Well, 
there ain’t no other way to fish proper like, exceptin’ 
with dynamite. Boy! there ’s sport for ye!”’ 

It developed that when he wanted fish he took his 
whole family to the river with him, armed with a 
few sticks of high explosive and some fuses. The 
family would then undress and form in two groups, 
one on each bank, while the head of the house tossed 
a quarter of a stick into a quiet pool and awaited re- 
sults. The explosion, if it worked, would not kill 
the fish but merely stun them, and they would rise 
to the surface for a few minutes before they were 
swept down-stream or came to and swam off. This 
was where the family came in. The minute the 
powder went off, they all dived in and captured the 
fish. 

‘¢Sometimes the big uns ’ll sink, and then ye have 
to dive for ’em or feel in the mud with yer toes.’’ 

It seemed to be the personal contact with the 
quarry that appealed; hooks and lines were such 
useless refinements, besides doing away with the ele- 
ment of individual touch. I remember certain lec- 
tures by my father, who is an enthusiastic dry-fly 
fisherman. He used to tell me of the unsportsman- 
like conduct of wretches who used worms instead of 


196 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


relying on imitation bait, and I thought to myself 
how truly is all virtue comparative. 

Throughout our talk, Mrs. Malone, who had that 
faculty common to Mexican women married to 
Americans, of understanding Iinglish without being 
able or confident enough to speak it, sat beside her 
husband, holding one of his hands in hers and 
patting it with the other. Her eyes shone with 
dog-like affection, which the old rancher accepted as 
a matter of course. As they had been married twenty 
years, I should have liked to ask him the secret of 
his obvious success in his experiment in nuptial hap- 
piness, but I hardly thought it would be proper to 
do so. 

When the time finally came for us to leave, I 
received the rest of my lesson in the convention of 
calling in the wilderness. Our horses had been fed 
and, with a dozen or so of the owner’s, were circling 
around the corral. Malone led the way to the end 
of the fence on which the saddles were parked, and 
each of my companions picked up one of the braided 
rope lariats which hung there. Wanting nothing 
so much as to make a good showing, I chose one and, 
trying to recall all the performances of Will Rogers 
that I had seen at the ‘‘Follies’’ began to swing it 
around my head. No one made any comment, but, 
standing aside, my host watched me with solemn 
eyes. 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 197 


I got the rope swinging beautifully, but the trouble 
was that the more I circled it above my head, the 
faster the horses galloped around the inelosure, 
until I grew dizzy trying to follow them. Moreover, 
my horse, having been in similar situations before, 
had burrowed into the very center of the group. I 
made three desperate and undeniably clumsy tries, 
my rope shooting out like a whip and landing in the 
dust behind the now terrified horses. 

At last my audience could contain itself no 
longer, and burst into roars of laughter. Not too 
long on temper, by this time, I stepped back and 
told my host to catch the darned animal himself: 
I didn’t really want him; I was sore from riding 
him, anyway. He smiled, and, taking my place, 
gave the rope a simple twist as it hung by his side. 
Then with a short underhand swing he sent it out, 
widening, as it went, into a loop which seemed to 
dodge in and out among the horses’ necks and, find- 
ing the one it sought, settled over it. 

‘‘Thet swingin’ it over yer head goes fine on ex- 
hibition, but, if ye really want to get the horse, 
don’t make no move: it jest scares ’em. Quiet like, 
and up and over!’’ As in the case of most things 
that are well done, the idea was less flourish and 
better skill. 

I was thankful that at least I knew how to saddle, 
and at last we were off, my hideous engine of tor- 


198 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


ture again under me. We left the ranch with but a 
few hours of daylight ahead of us, laden with let- 
ters hastily written for us to carry out, and soon 
began to overtake the traffic on the highway. The 
trail, which had been deserted in the morning, was 
now spaced with travelers who evidently had waited 
for the heat of the day to pass before they set out. 
There were long strings of pack-burros, laden with 
wood and hay and vegetables, Mexican ranchers in 
elaborate outfits, silver-trimmed and on beautiful 
horses, and we caught up to and passed one caravan. 

This caravan consisted of a train of some thirty 
animals. At the head rode two men on horseback, 
armed to the teeth, with two revolvers and a gun 
apiece; and behind them several children, from ten 
to twelve years old, astride burros. After them, the 
pack-animals, two trunks, each as large as a ward- 
robe, hunched up on their backs, watched over by 
peons in big sombreros and with sandaled feet who 
trotted alongside. Bringing up the rear were the 
women folk. 

The women were all very large and fat and had 
discarded their habitual black for cooler white. on 
the journey. Bundled up, side-saddle-fashion on 
diminutive burros, they looked like haystacks cov- 
ered with white tarpaulins. Perched behind each 
one, and hanging on for dear life to what little of the 
burro’s back there was left, rode a child. Evidently, 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 199 


there was no race-suicide in this family. Another 
armed man closed the procession. As we trotted 
by, each woman covered her face with one of the 
loose folds of her sheet, evidently afraid that we 
should be overcome by the sight of such beauty 
blooming alone in the desert. 

Night came upon us half-way back, and for a 
while I admit I was nervous about my horse find- 
ing its way. But we couldn’t miss the trail, for 
to go ten feet off it, would have been to run into the 
side of the canon, and there were eyes in my steed’s 
feet which found a safe landing-place with each step. 

So I settled myself to endure the tortures of my 
saddle and to think up new names for the inventor 
of the contraption, and for the man who, knowing 
my size, had given me the misfit. I didn’t have to 
eat off the mantelpiece when I got in,—I had n’t 
touched the saddle enough for that,—but that front 
board put a bow in my legs which I fear I have n’t 
yet lost. 


But Sundays were not all of this care-free sort. 
Many mines work seven days a week, and, as if 
to prove that there were no modern innovations that 
we had not at least tried, the engineering depart- 
ment put in a good many extra days. 

A pleasant sport known as ‘‘shaft-plumbing’’ was 
the cause of it all. As the ore at Monte was being 


200 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


taken out, new depths were constantly being ex- 
plored, and the shaft had already been sunk four 
hundred feet below the lowest mining-level. It then 
became necessary for the engineers to find out what 
was what at the bottom of this hole and to set lines 
so that the lowest workings would be directly under 
those above and connections could be made accu- 
rately. 

To do this, we let down two piano wires with heavy 
weights on the ends. The line of the wires is known 
above, and a transit telescope is worked on the same 
line below. It ’s all very simple in theory, but means 
many hours of patient effort and considerable pro- 
fanity in practice. For shafts usually rain torrents 
of water and handfuls of high-speed pebbles, and 
four-hundred-foot piano wires snap when one looks 
at them. We had to work Sundays, because then we 
could stop the hoisting above, and have at least a 
fighting chance to save our heads from falling rock. 

I remember the first Sunday we went down, be- 
cause the bitterness of standing in the cage and 
watching a perfect spring morning—just made for 
tennis and the doing of nothing at all—disappear 
as we dropped, made a strong impression on me. 
Of course we turned the top of our heads toward 
perfect days all through the week, but there’s some 
psychological something about Sunday, and man’s 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 201 


inherent right to it, that makes all the difference 
in the world. 

However, we were a happy-go-lucky crew—eight 
engineers and as many ayudantes, in armor dry and 
caked from the preceding day’s work—and we made 
an adventure of it. Eighteen hundred feet straight 
down through the rock, and then we were ready for 
the four hundred more in the ‘‘burro.’’ ‘‘Burro’’ 
was the nickname for the little iron saucepan at 
the end of a string that dangled in the downward 
extension of the shaft. While half the party worked 
at the top, with the other half I was detailed to go 
below in this thing. 

Kighteen shower baths couldn’t have poured 
more water on us than that shaft. The ground 
water of a thousand feet was seeping into it and 
falling on us; for the burro had no hat on. The 
burro had no sides, either, and we had to hang to 
one another when the hoist-man took off the brakes 
and let us go. } 

Lights went out—pst/—and left darkness, and 
iron clanking against rock. We battered back and 
forth and clung together more tightly. Heating 
arrangements in the shower were very poor. The 
water was icy. At last a thump told us we were at 
the bottom, and we clambered out into the protec- 
tion of the little cave that had been hollowed there. 


202 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


If we had been in an apartment-house, I should say 
we had reached the furnace room. For, after the 
shaft, windy and cold, this unventilated pocket was 
an inferno for heat. 

I think I ’ve never felt so cut off from the world 
as I did that morning at the bottom of twenty-two 
hundred feet of man-made gopher-hole. The mo- 
notonous, deadening sweep of the shaft rain; the 
flat heat of the air, a heat fed direct from the eternal 
fires below us; the choking smallness of the little 
cave—it was all most oppressive. Except for a 
thin bell-rope, we were completely cut off from those 
above. 

For two hours we waited, and at the end of that 
time the first piano wire came wiggling down out 
of the darkness. Another hour, and another wire. 
We could go ahead with our work. This was to place 
a telescope, with cross-hairs within, in the exact line 
of the two wires. That sounds easy. It takes only 
about three hundred trials, with men relieving one 
another, as they get ‘‘bat-eyed’’ from looking too 
long at the fine-traced threads in the instrument. I 
must have an exceptionally bad disposition, because 
every time I sat down after a turn and closed my 
eyes, a vision of that sunlit tennis-court, half a 
mile above us, came to me, and the ‘‘God of Things 
as They Ought to Be’’ hung his head. 

But when it was done at last, and the burro ride 


A SUNDAY’S ADVENTURING 203 


taken once more, the weirdness of that tiny oven 
on the devil’s hearth began to appeal. One of the 
most comforting facts of human psychology is that 
no matter how unpleasant an experience is, at the 
time, let a few hours roll by and the good points 
all begin to emerge. Romance is born of what was 
sordid; bravery of perils fled. The longer I was 
out of that hole, the more I enjoyed having been in 
it. But I can’t say it helped much when we had 
to go down again the next Sunday—and forego a 
trip to Cobre to play golf. Romance is an elusive 
thing: one can’t fold it up and put it in one’s pocket 
to take out and admire when the spirit wills. 


CHAPTER XI 
LIFE IN EXILE 


ROM the beginning of my stay on the hill, I 

had the feeling that we were all living on 
a ship; and a ship which was sailing on a mission so 
momentous that no one dared speak of his goal 
beyond the cryptic remark, ‘‘We are at Monte for 
only a while, you know!’’ To see the same people 
day after day, to eat with them, work and play 
with them, and have no way of escaping them, 
heightened the analogy, as did the fact that the per- 
sonnel seemed to have been chosen entirely at ran- 
dom and the passenger-list included men and women 
who had no more in common than the circumstance 
of being on the same voyage. The dormitory, where 
we bachelors lived, added a few physical details, 
for it had a veranda around it which was paced as 
regularly as any boat’s deck. 

We slept on a second-story porch, screened from 
insects, and this too heightened the illusion, because 
the one drawback to an otherwise perfect weather 
record were the terrific winds which began in 


early spring and kept up steadily, with surpris- 
204 


LIFE IN EXILE 205 


ing intensity, for several months. At night these 
conscientious hurricanes would gain such velocity 
that they literally picked the light frame of the 
sleeping quarters up in their arms and tossed it 
about. I would feel my couch rising and falling 
under me, and my ears were filled with the melan- 
choly whistling of the wind through the screens, 
for all the world like an Atlantic gale rushing 
through the rigging. 

I even thought that our voyage was a good deal 
like Noah’s, for he too knew not whither he went 
but only that he could not get off, and he must have 
experienced all the difficulties, caused by family 
feuds, which were the bane of our superintendent’s 
existence. 

The routine on board was monotonously regular 
during the week. Up at six o’clock in the dark, and 
down the hill. I have always held that one of the 
things God expressly did not intend man to do was 
to get up before the sun; why, else, did He arrange 
that people should not be able to see in the dark? 
But perhaps that is beside the point, for with the 
perverseness of human nature, after the sun finally 
did appear, wandering in over the mountains about 
half-past seven, we took one good look at it and 
then went underground, where it could be seen no 
more! And when we finally came up, it was to shut 
ourselves up in a stuffy office with outdoors calling, 


206 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


not from the other end of an hour’s train ride, as 
in a city, but from a distance no greater than the 
thickness of the wooden prison walls we had built 
around ourselves. 

But even prisoners escape, and at four-thirty we 
fled, usually to the cantina. There we gave a daily 
demonstration of the powers of what Don Stewart 
called ‘‘The Great Equalizer,’’? which in this case 
was the very excellent beer of Hermosillo. The at- 
tendance at the cantina was pretty much the same 
from day to day. First there was the old English 
engineer of the Diesel compressors, who introduced 
himself as a ‘‘bloody Diesel-wiper who ’s talked with 
kings before you was born, sonny!’’ He always 
opened the session by ordering the first round and 
shouting, ‘‘ ’T ain’t often we kill a pig! Uno, dos, 
tres . . . cinco beers, Pete!”’ 

Beside him sat the ‘‘old-time foreman,’’ who also 
had known the world before it went to the devil. 
He was a big, bent hulk of a man, marked with the 
sears of many accidents, who had adopted Mexico 
as his country after years of roving, demanding lit- 
tle beyond the deference which, as a white man, he 
received from the natives. A miner and no more, 
anywhere else, in this foreign land he was the czar 
among his men; a good example of a relic of pioneer 
days, he was reminiscent, kindly, and marvelously 
and beautifully profane. 


LIFE IN EXILE 207 


By his side, sitting at the feet of wisdom, sprawled 
the ‘‘young engineer.’’ Graduated from a middle- 
Western mining school, fleeing from the vague dis- 
content of the age, or satisfying some hidden spark 
of adventure, he had left his fireside and wandered 
down into Mexico to learn his trade and discover 
what a sorry imitation of the real thing is the min- 
ing taught in schools. Perhaps some day he 
would be like the older man beside him, whose style 
of conversation he copied; or perhaps there was a 
stronger flame within him which would carry him 
on until, from a desk chair in an office below Brook- 
lyn Bridge, Monte would appear rosy in the 
distance. | 

The next member of the group was the ‘‘heavy- 
drinking clerk.’’ Here was Main Street desperately 
fighting to be free, taking alcohol for an ally and 
riding forth on the wings its fumes provided. He 
was a pale-faced youth, despite the climate, slight 
of build, and dressed in the latest of syndicated 
fashions from mail-order houses. Only thirty, he 
had been in nearly every corner of the globe— 
South America, Africa, Alaska; and Europe, in 
the months when he had found himself during the 
Great War. The war had taken him and fitted him 
in, but with its conclusion he was demobilized out 
of his uniform and back into his habits. He spent 
all his capital to get to Chile, and fell into a job in 


208 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


a mine office. With a new shop, all was put in order, 
and he felt that at last here was a community that 
he belonged to. Then, little by little, the sameness 
of it conquered him as he learned that the new-found 
friends who welcomed him, a new face, so warmly, 
were only human, and that it took them but a month 
or two to hear all that he had to say and to tell him 
all they knew. So he stayed until he had put by 
another nest-egg and then lost it, rambling on to 
far-off Africa. 

There the same performance was repeated, alcohol 
and ennui going hand in hand, until he was thor- 
oughly satiated and waited only to buy himself a 
new field. Alaska, the States once more, and now 
Mexico. Before I left, he was off again, this time 
to another part of South America, on a wandering, 
untiring search for the Grail of Content. The ele- 
ments of it may have been in himself, but he could 
not see them, and so he would go on, a vagabond, 
drifting and drinking, until the ability of a soaked 
vessel to hold wine and a few stories to tell would 
be all there was left. He was a typical member of 
the shifting population of a mining-camp. 

And finally there was Harry, the other English- 
man, blown into camp by a stray breeze, surrounded 
with three trunks, two golf-bags, and a erate of 
pictures of the girls he had left behind him. His 
trunks had disgorged equipment for every climate, 


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IME, POFN Loe: 


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LIFE IN EXILE 209 


from pole to pole, in mufti and in uniform, and his 
conversation soon made it evident that he had used 
it all. When we learned that he was the youngest 
son of a British family, it was the finishing touch; 
no gathering in a foreign country is complete with- 
out one such. 

The conversation of the miscellaneous group was 
intensely interesting, for in their peregrinations 
the various members had penetrated every out-of- 
the-way nook on this sphere; and the talk would fly 
familiarly about, from the sunny Bay of Naples, 
with its smoking sentinel that is Vesuvius, to the 
fever-traps of the equator, and pass lightly on to 
an incident with the gray sky and blue-white gla- 
ciers of Alaska for its background. 

The cantima we favored (which became known as 
the ‘‘American Club’’) had a veranda that hung 
over the side of the mountain, so that we sat with 
our feet up on the railing and looked dreamily out 
on the purpling prospect of the ranges as the sun, 
tired out from its long trip across the sky, dropped 
wearily into the couch of hills that it had covered 
with sheets of gold and crimson against its rest. In 
the spring, when the valley was covered with the 
blossoms of innumerable peach-trees, and the 
stringed band was playing softly in the plaza below, 
the charm of our view defied description. The petty 
cliques of the town above and the sordid poverty at 


210 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


our feet were forgotten, and only beauty, pure and 
eternal, remained, to soothe the battered spirit of 
the old pioneer and to fill the heart of the young 
miner with dreams of his future. The little clerk 
was all that he might have been, and I think Harry 
was back in England, filled with that pleasant melan- 
choly which is the result of a gnawing Wanderlust. 

As for me, I am afraid I thought of a flaming sun- 
set seen at the end of a brown-stone cafion in a far- 
off city, and the smell of gasolene and hot asphalt 
seemed to saturate the air. The roar of the shops 
turned into the dull vibration of the city’s traffic; 
the gleam of the sun in the tiny windows of the 
houses opposite were only the electric signs on 
Broadway, twinkling an invitation to see the great- 
est hit of the year. 

From such pleasant things it was a rude awaken- 
ing to have to plod up the hill to ‘‘chow.’’ There 
were two positions in camp in the filling of which 
everybody on the mountain-top took an interest. 
One was that of the school-teacher, and the other 
was the cook’s. Not only did most of our discontent 
lie at the latter’s door, but he was one side of a 
grand battle which was waged for months. The week 
after I got to camp the position changed hands for 
the first time. We had had a Chinaman whose idea 
of a staple dinner was one which had for its piéce de 
resistance What we called ‘‘Chinese pasties.’’ They 


LIFE IN EXILE 211 


consisted of balls of dough, about the size of a fist, 
soaked in grease and fried. They had no flavoring, 
no filling, no sauce, only their leaden selves to rec- 
ommend them. The superintendent, fearing the men 
would be so laden down with these concoctions that 
re-ascent from the bottom of the mine would be 
impossible, dispensed with his services and imported 
the Joneses. 

The Joneses were a newly married couple. He 
was ugly, dirty, ill-dressed, sly, and conceited, and 
given to the most heinous exaggeration. She was 
no improvement in looks and had a kaleidoscopic 
face which, when she shook it up, ran through con- 
tortions expressing the whole gamut of human emo- 
tions, from good-humored tolerance to fanatic vin- 
dictiveness. However, they could cook, and we were 
considerably relieved at the disappearance of Orien- 
tal conceptions of Western diet and settled down to 
get some pleasure out of our meals. 

The Joneses saw to it that we did not stay settled 
long. They at once contended that catering for the 
Saturday dances was not in their contract, and, when 
the clamor of the ladies had died down, made death- 
less enemies of all the males in camp by refusing to 
serve Sunday breakfast after eight o’clock. It is 
impossible to realize what bitter depths of feeling 
such little things can awaken, unless one has lived 
in a small isolated community; cooking or no cook- 


212 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


ing, in a month Monte had had enough of the 
J oneses. 

But there was no obvious way of getting rid of 
them, and daily they got more on every one’s nerves. 
They finally settled the situation, themselves. As 
long as they were united, the enmity of the entire 
community could not budge them, but at the end 
of another month civil war set in. Jones had a 
grandson born to him by the daughter of an earlier 
marriage. On the afternoon of the great event he 
appeared, with the telegram in his hand, at our 
evening beer-imbibing session, and bought a bottle 
of cognac with which to celebrate. 

After two or three drinks it came out that all was 
not so rosy in the enemy’s camp as might have been 
supposed. Jones admitted that he had been putting 
up with his wife’s idiosyncrasies merely out of a 
sentimental regard for a young bride, but he de- 
clared, after another drink, that it was high time he 
established his own undoubted superiority. I am 
ashamed to say we clapped him on the back and 
said, ‘‘By all means uphold the honor of the mas- 
culine sex.’’ However, he was not a pleasant drink- 
ing companion, so we left him to his determination 
and went on up the hill. 

Mrs. Jones had gotten dinner alone that night, 
and the Mexican girl who served it brought out, 
from the kitchen, reports of an electrical tension in 


LIFE IN EXILE 213 


the heated air. About the middle of dinner, Jones 
himself appeared at the front door, having come 
straight up from where we had left him, the now 
empty cognac bottle in one hand, and his other 
hand clenching and unclenching in a manner which 
indicated a mental struggle. He stood by the en- 
trance for several minutes, and a look of great de- 
termination came into his eyes: he had found him- 
self at last! Without speaking to any one, he made 
a bee-line for the kitchen. All interest in the meal 
was suspended. There was a dead hush, during 
which we looked at one another in hopeful silence 
and waited. Results were intensely gratifying to 
the lover of melodrama. 

Ten seconds of waiting and then a scream! Rose, 
the waitress, flying as if for her life, came through 
the swinging doors from the back and collapsed in 
tears of fright on one of the tables. In the half- 
second the doors were open, I got a clear picture of 
the scene beyond. Jones, the bottle still in one hand, 
was crouched in front of the stove, a hideous ex- 
pression on his face. His other hand, which had 
been so nervous, was frozen on the handle of a 
long, bloody butcher’s knife. He was swaying very 
slightly and seemed poised to strike. I could not 
see Mrs. Jones, but, terrified lest murder had been 
done, I sprang up. 

No need! There was a terrific crash which 


214 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


sounded remarkably like breaking china, and the 
doors trembled. Another and another followed, 
with veritable machine-gun rapidity, and the doors 
came open again to allow the ferocious Mr. Jones 
to make a startling exit. Knife and bottle were 
still in his hands, but they were held over his head 
in a protective pose, and he was running. Moreover, 
the sole shot we saw fired was a heavy coffee cup 
of the one-arm-lunch variety, which came with him, 
only at so much greater velocity that it passed him 
easily and landed on the floor on the other side of 
the room. So heavily built was it that beyond the 
loss of its stub of a handle it survived its voyage un- 
scarred. No wonder Jones was routed by a bom- 
bardment with such ammunition! Mrs. Jones fol- 
lowed, but halted in the middle of the room. I 
should enjoy repeating her remarks to her rapidly 
vanishing husband, word for word, but the neces- 
sary censoring would take so much of the beauty 
and fire from them that I hardly think what re- 
mained would do her justice. 

One would have thought that with an opening 
engagement as tremendous as this, the war would 
have been of short duration, but for some reason, 
Jones, sobering up, even if he lacked the spirit to 
strike again, had retained most of his determination, 
in a sly, sullen way. Nor had Mrs. Jones followed 
up her victory, but soon after had given up to fem- 


LIFE IN EXILE 215 


inine tears and told one of the matrons of the 
camp that she had been driven to retaliation only 
after she had been ‘‘beaten to a pulp.’’ These 
changes in attitude brought the couple again to 
nearly an equal basis, as regards military strength 
and morale, but war had been declared and they 
settled down to a siege which lasted a month. Mrs. 
Jones’s plan of campaign centered on an endeavor 
to cut Mr. Jones off from his base of supplies, which 
was the cantina, and Mr. Jones put all his energy 
into devising means for running the blockade. 

The camp was, of course, intensely interested, 
and the betting ran high at even money, but the con- 
sensus of desire was that it would end in double 
murder. We all wished, however, that they would 
‘‘make it snappy,’’ for, they being intent on their 
own affairs, the Chinese kitchen boy now prepared 
all the meals for them, and, with characteristic Chi- 
nese reverence for his elders, he reverted to the 
style of his previous boss and the famous ‘‘pasty’’ 
reappeared. This phlegmatic youth, who we felt 
would be our death, was the one who finally saved 
us. 

For, wearied of inaction, but not daring to tackle 
each other, the Joneses attacked poor Chung. The 
Oriental worm turns without warning. After the 
third encounter, Chung came up one morning with 
a revolver in his sleeve and indulged in a little 


216 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


target practice, using his master and mistress for 
bull’s eyes. Perhaps if he had confined his efforts to 
one or the other, he would have done better, but, en- 
deavoring to annihilate both, he hit neither, and 
presently was seen peacefully descending the hill, 
having run out of ammunition. United by their 
common danger, Mr. and Mrs. Jones left town the 
next day. 

With the close of this excitement, I found myself 
somewhat at a loss for a topic of local interest until 
one day Don introduced me to the youngsters of 
the camp, of whom he was very fond. There were 
ten or twelve children on the mountain, mostly 
girls, and they had very little in the way of enter- 
tainment, since Mah Jong was a bit difficult for most 
of them and their youth forbade participation in the 
beer-drinking. So Don had more or less adopted the 
bunch of them, ranging from three or four years 
to twelve, and was exceedingly popular with them. 
He took me on as assistant, and Sunday afternoons 
we used to hold Field Day in front of the dormitory. 

When Easter came, we planned a surprise for the 
children and induced a great number of Easter bun- 
nies to come to Monte and lay eggs where they might 
be found. The bunnies obligingly left us over fifty, 
for we counted them particularly. Satisfied that all 
was well, we slept on our information and the next 


LIFE IN EXILE 217 


afternoon gathered all the children in camp together 
and started them out on their search. 

They scampered off up the side of the hill and 
with shrieks of excitement went after the hidden 
treasures. Hither and thither they flew, and we 
stood below, shouting directions. But five, ten, 
twenty minutes passed, and not an egg was found. 
As we had emphasized the fact that rabbits laid in 
a very restricted area, about a hundred feet square, 
and had seen with our own eyes what they had left, 
we knew something was radically wrong and joined 
the hunt ourselves. In a thorough search, during 
which we got almost as excited as the children, we 
found—a half-dozen! But where were the rest? We 
held a hasty conference, each suspicious of the 
other’s knowledge, until the real culprits gave them- 
selves away. From down the slope came a chorus 
of bleatings, and we turned to see a herd of goats 
coming up the hill for a second search. It had been 
Easter for them, too! It took much explaining, and 
more ice-cream, to appease the children whom we 
had so mercilessly deceived. 

The position of school-teacher to these youngsters 
was one which attracted much attention. There 
seemed to be but one reason for a girl’s coming to 
this out-of-the-way spot, and that was hardly teach- 
ing; it was too easy a way to pick up a convenient 


218 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


husband, with a fair variety to choose from. Of 
the married women at Monte, over half had been 
school-teachers. Any girl who feels that a husband 
is essential to her happiness, had better pack her 
trunk, take the next train for the Southwest, and 
announce her calling to be that of a _ teacher. 
Whether or not she can teach anything is entirely 
immaterial; in fact, judging from the successes I 
have seen, it would be probably just as well if she 
knew nothing at all! 

She need not even be pretty: men who have not 
seen a woman of their own race for a year are not 
entirely normal. They are like most men in the 
first stages of intoxication, except that, so long as 
they remain in camp, the effect will not wear off 
or degenerate into baser instincts. They will marry 
any one or anything that comes their way and will 
have them. When I got back from camp, I had to 
be very careful to call on the least prepossessing 
of my feminine acquaintances first and gradually 
work up, until I had regained the strength to say 
more than a dozen words to a pretty girl without 
proposing to her. 

But that is aside. The school-teacher at Monte 
was newly arrived from Missouri. She was a very 
pretty girl and, once initiated, could manage a 
host of callers at her diminutive house with a com- 
posure I defy the Fifth Avenue débutante to equal. 


LIFE IN EXILE 219 


She was the only unmarried girl in camp, her prede- 
cessor having annexed the general foreman of the 
mine, after he had withstood the attacks of teachers 
over a period of twenty years. Her growing popu- 
larity even bit into the ranks of our serious drink- 
ers, because she held high tea at four-thirty and 
her house was on the main pathway leading from 
the office. Any sunset one could find half a dozen 
young engineers and clerks grouped in languid, 
adoring poses on her front doorstep, waiting to be 
passed a cup of lukewarm tea from the already 
crowded interior. It seemed a shame that she had 
to pay her board by the month, for every night there 
were ten men anxious to escort her to dinner at 
the one Mexican restaurant which was within the 
bounds of public approval. 

I regret she did not get along so well with the 
matrons of the camp, who were inclined to call 
her names which I felt were slightly extravagant, 
and which I might have suspected were inspired by 
jealousy—if I had n’t been so sure of the absolute 
virtue of women who had themselves once been in 
the very position this girl held. A serious fracture 
nearly took place after she had been with us some 
time. One of the machinists was blessed with a 
red-headed wife of ample proportions, and a 
freckled youngster who had picked up his vocabu- 
lary from his father, around the shops. One day, in 


220 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


school, he got into some mix-up with the fair in- 
structress, who was herself of generous build and 
possessed of no mean physical power, acquired on 
the farm in Missouri. The boy, slightly irritated, 
told her what he thought of her, in terms vigorous 
but out of place, and she took him by the nape of 
the neck and administered a physical rebuke. His 
screams were heard by his gentle mother, who lived 
not far from the school, and she hastened to the 
scene of the struggle. The cause of the disturbance 
was instantly forgotten, and personalities of those 
old enough to know better entered into the argu- 
ment, which, from all accounts, degenerated into a 
‘‘free for all,’’ not even the Marquis of Queens- 
bury’s rules being observed. 

But the physical side of the encounter was the 
least important, for people are very near the funda- 
mentals when cooped up in isolated communities, 
and such incidents are likely to occur. It was what 
followed that mattered, for when the merit of the 
contestants came into general discussion in camp, it 
was found that a sharp line could be drawn be- 
tween those who believed the school-teacher entirely 
in the right and those who held that nothing could 
be said for her and that she ought to be discharged 
for her conduct. 

Curiously enough, the first party included every 
man in camp and not a single woman, and the sec- 


LIFE IN EXILE 221 


ond, therefore, was one hundred percent feminine. 
But, as luck would have it, civil war again saved 
the day, for, perhaps from having been worked up 
by her encounter, or possibly because of some stand 
taken by her husband that evening, Mrs. Machinist 
and Mr. Machinist staged the second physical en- 
gagement that Monte saw that day, and Mr. Ma- 
chinist, although used to throwing hundred-and- 
eighty-pound drills around, was discovered at ten 
that night drinking down his sorrow in the cantina, 
with a discolored optic. Mrs. Machinist left in the 
morning, and Mr. Machinist was heard to say some- 
thing very like ‘‘ Thank God!’’ when she disappeared 
into the tunnel. The lesson of this last sad tale is 
on the order of ‘‘Be sure you love before you leap— 
into Monte!’’ There is no test of one’s relations 
with one’s fellow-men—and women—like the 
wilderness! 


CHAPTER XII 
DOWN THE HILL 


HE Americans of Monte had what I used to call 

the ‘‘exile attitude.’’ Cut off from the rest of 
the world as these people were, certain attitudes 
toward life seemed to flourish particularly well 
among them; and, entirely aside from their social 
status, one could divide them into groups, each of 
which had developed a different way of looking at 
life. 

First, there were those who lived almost entirely 
in the past, most of them women, who, unsuited to 
the wilderness and having no common ground with 
any one in camp beyond the fact that they were all 
there together, filled their minds with a morbid glor- 
ification of the past. Since it was undoubtedly gone 
forever, they could perform all the mental gym- 
nastics with it they chose, and build for themselves 
a beautiful dream world which they could contem- 
plate in pleasant melancholy. 

Then there were those whose pasts were buried— 
pasts so drab that they could not look back, or so 


happy that memory itself was pain. Still, they dis- 
222 


DOWN THE HILL 223 


liked the lives they were leading and looked forward 
to the day when they would be up and away. These 
were the truly pathetic ones, for the first class was 
so absorbed in self-pity as to forfeit sympathy. 
They were chained to life; had gone too far along 
the road to be able to turn back or to cut for them- 
selves another groove, and, like the heavy-drinking 
clerk, drifted on from camp to camp, always pushing 
toward a future which was in their minds alone and 
never would be reality. 

The third class comprised those peculiar indi- 
viduals to whom the life was suited, and who fitted 
in as no psychoanalysis could fit them in elsewhere. 
People who live either wholly in their past or wholly 
in the future necessarily live a life within them- 
selves, and in their intercourse with the rest of the 
world cannot be whole personalities, because so 
large a part of them is locked away in their heads. 
They play at being interested in the people around 
them and in the things those people do, but they are 
only peeping over the wall they have built around 
themselves. It is the man who lives in to-day, no 
matter how well he may have planned his future, 
who is gregarious, and whom one meets and lives 
with and goes away from with the impression that 
one has known a real person. | 

The men who love the life in a mining-camp—and 
they appear to be fewer than they ought to be—have 


224 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


somehow developed a unique attitude. I asked one 
engineer who seemed particularly attached to his 
life with us, what it was that held him. 

‘‘Mainly,’’ he said, ‘‘it ’s getting back to civiliza- 
tion !”’ 

‘But, good Heavens!’’ I answered; ‘‘if you care 
so much for being in civilization, surely you can go 
and live where you wish.’’ (He was a single man.) 

He laughed when I said this and replied that it 
was not living in the crowded places, but the getting 
back to them that he wanted. 

‘““The thrill of going out after you have been in 
here a year is worth every second of the three hun- 
dred and sixty-five days—to feel the world around 
you again, to jingle new money in your pocket and 
have nothing before you but one grand and glorious 
bat. But I want to get the money spent, once the 
riot is over, and I think I enjoy it infinitely more 
when it ’s done; I muse over it for months after- 
ward. I never stay long: just up to the point where 
I feel my illusions of the gayety of the city begin- 
ning to totter. If those illusions ever went, then I 
don’t believe I ’d have a thing left to live for. I 
know I’m fooling myself, but it is gay when you 
only see it once a year. There’s just enough ex- 
citement to last about two weeks, and those people 
who live there try to spread it out over a whole year; 
that ’s why they get cynical about it. But when you 


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BUY YOUR FUEL SUPPLY EARLY 
Unloading a burro train of firewood on the trail up to the American Colony 


DOWN THE HILL 225 


have done nothing but work for a year and seen few 
faces around you, then nothing in the world can 
compare to the delight of tasting all that you have 
been denied !”’ 

He was quite right, in a way: I know that I shall 
never forget the first week after I got out, and it 
was spent in a little border town. New York never 
afforded the thrills that the border cabarets of Ari- 
zona gave me! 

But, along with this attitude, most of the men who 
like the job have other things which help to hold 
them. There is always the satisfaction that goes 
with constructive work. My first instructor loved 
the romance of the darkness underground; the old 
miners lived on the gratification they derived from 
consciousness of their superiority to the Mexicans, 
and one or two had a true pioneer’s worship of end- 
less mountains and limitless skies. These people, 
their lives ordered, lived and grew prosperous; the 
others—the great majority, the turn-over indicated 
—drifted on and on, less content with each new place 
to which they went, but gaining some consolation 
from the appeasing of their Wanderlust. One or 
two there were, and no more, who loved their work 
for its own sake, and who would go up the ladder 
hand over hand until they reached the top, whether 
they cared for the present or no. 

The evolution of the industry on the hill had de- 


226 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


veloped some queer jobs for the men who ranit. I 
have often wondered why more mine superinten- 
dents are not chosen for foreign diplomatic posts. 
No class of men in the world can be more silent; for 
the value of the mine, the statistics of its operation, 
and its geology are locked in the superintendent’s 
head, and no man on earth can pump them out of 
him. With that as a fundamental characteristic, the 
head of a big mine has a training in diplomacy and 
etiquette equal to that of the greatest masters of 
Europe. 

Imagine yourself with half a dozen houses on your 
hands, and as many married couples to allot them 
to. The houses are identical in every respect, but 
of course cannot all occupy the same spot, and so 
their location is bound to prove the fly in the oint- 
ment when it comes to assigning them. Moreover, 
the salaries of the men involved probably differ as 
much as twenty dollars a month. Think of the con- 
sternation of A.’s wife at being given a house 
farther down the hill than Mrs. B., when A. gets 
fifteen dollars a month more than B. (and has a 
much better brain!); and picture to yourself how 
happy will be the relations between A. and B. dur- 
ing their stay in camp. Then, if you have not had 
enough drama, ask some of the couples to dinner 
(af you want real trouble, don’t ask them at all!) ; 
and if your wife’s cook can get in touch with the rest 


DOWN THE HILL 227 


of the culinary departments in camp, get her to tell 
you what they think of your having the C’s before 
the B’s, and giving the A’s a cold supper when those 
cheap little D’s came for a full Sunday dinner. And 
note how well the men pull together after their wives 
have been nagging at them all the night before! 
You do not need kid gloves with which to handle 
people, in such circumstances; you need silk ones of 
the very finest quality, and, equipped with these, you 
must work with the most delicate touch. And even 
then Mrs. I. will say that it is a perfect shame that 
her friend Mrs. X. from the border (wife of the mill 
manager there), whom she has been trying, for 
years, to persuade to visit her, has to stay with you 
(although Heaven knows you hate the sight of her) 
because she must be a guest of the company, and you 
are the official host. And Mr. W. will be sullen for 
three weeks because you had a director of the com- 
pany (who is a terrible bore and sticks a finger in 
everything that does not concern him) visiting you, 
and so you could n’t take in his fiancée the only pos- 
sible time she could get down to see him! By all 
laws of logic, superintendents should end either at 
the Court of St. James or in the insane-asylum! 
While the superintendent received his education 
in diplomacy the poor doctor had to content himself 
with being a merchant. True, he did some doctoring 
too, although causes too far-reaching and too old to 


228 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


be under his control made his practice discouraging, 
but I think the most interesting part of his job— 
the part which interests all doctors who are good at 
it—was the collecting of fees. The company 
paid him a salary, and illness which could be traced 
to the mine he cared for gratis, but he was allowed 
to have a practice of his own and it was with this 
that he had his fun. For, obviously, since the wo- 
men spent their daily allowance on the first essen- 
tials of life, and the bread-winners drank up what 
was left, there was very little with which to pay 
doctors’ bills. 

Almost every one, however, owned some kind of 
live stock, and when the up-keep of the animals be- 
came too much of a tax, the logical solution was to 
settle the problem and the physician’s bill at the 
same time and turn the stock over to him. What 
splendid training for one whose profession is noted 
for its lack of business ability! Two or three settle- 
ments might come in to the doctor in a day, so that 
by evening he would find himself the proud posses- 
sor of four cows, a moth-eaten bull, a litter of pigs, 
and perhaps half a hundred hens. He would then 
have to take the next day off and go down into mar- 
ket and find out the prevailing prices; and after he 
had satisfied himself as to the value of his acquisi- 
tions, he still had to find purchasers and drive his 
bargains. 


DOWN THE HILL 229 


One doctor who had never spoken a word of Span- 
ish before he came to camp, six months later was 
one of our best scholars, purely from carrying on his 
business of converting live stock into cash. More- 
over, he had learned his lesson in trade as well as 
in Spanish, and I think made as much more again 
from bartering as from his regular fees. I once 
saw him talking with a man, and at a distance they 
both looked so pained and were talking so earnestly 
that I thought at once that they must be discussing 
a very serious case. As I drew nearer, the Mexican 
threw his hands into the air and a look of such tragic 
resignation came over his face as he turned away 
that I felt how much the worst part of a medical 
man’s profession it must be to see the suffering in 
the faces of his patients. What was my amazement, 
when I went up to condole with the doctor on the 
evident loss of another patient, to find him wreathed 
in smiles and to have him grab my arm and rush me 
off to celebrate the conclusion of a bargain which he 
had just made to his distinct profit. The expression 
on the faces of the two men had been a part of the 
business etiquette of the country. 

But the strangest job of any man in camp was 
that of the employment agent. At his desk he saw 
perhaps ten men a day, but he was a busy man, for 
all of that, as his marriage bureau took up most of 
his time. I think I have mentioned the fact that 


230 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


the company had to support the widows of the men 
who were killed in the mine, and that the obligation 
entailed no small expense. However, in the inter- 
pretation of the law, it ceased if the widows took to 
themselves other protectors, and so the sooner they 
were married again the better for every one con- 
cerned. Hspagne, who was the agent, was given the 
task of bringing these deserving widows into touch 
with equally deserving lonesome men. He arranged 
meetings, spread propaganda, and took a fatherly 
interest in the affaires d’amour of his protégées. 

Over the virtue of the lone widow, Espagne 
watched with an eagle eye, and at the first suggestion 
of scandal he made it plain to the gentleman in- 
volved that the only honorable course was to marry 
the lady; and that, incidentally, men without honor 
were not wanted in the employ of the company. 
Moreover, he was a sort of traffic officer, his red sign 
being for those who had never taken the step, and 
thus clearing the road for those dependent upon the 
company. It is doubtful whether the débutantes of 
Monte entirely approved of him, but of the gratitude 
of the widows there is no question: they would much 
rather remain in Monte with a legitimate protector 
than drift to Mexico City, where they were entitled 
to go, with the possibility of none at all. 

I think the greatest appeal of life in exile is the 
opportunity to see little comedies like this work out; 


DOWN THE HILL 231 


to be able to watch them as it would be impossible to 
do inacity. It is like having people in a laboratory, 
where one can regulate conditions and watch the 
progress of an experiment. There are two ways of 
experimenting in psychology: take one individual 
and try the effects of a number of different stimuli; 
or, given a number of persons, submit them to the 
same set of circumstances and note the different 
reactions. For the latter experiment, Monte was 
almost ideal. Every one had the same kind of life 
to lead, the same problems to work out, and each met 
in his own way the lot Fate meted out to him. And 
here, so far from the rest of the world, an intensity 
was developed which left little question of what was 
going on in the mind of each. 

It was not until the time finally came for me to 
leave Monte that I realized the full depths of feeling 
of the people among whom [ had been living. As 
long as one is a permanent member of a community, 
the facilities for obtaining confidences are limited. 
True, there are always those who are looking for 
some one with whom to share their crosses and 
crowns of thorns, and who need no more than a kind 
word to cause them to let one into the innermost 
chambers of their hearts; but the normal individual 
is wary of telling too much to any one whom he is 
bound to see every day of his life for an indefinite 
time to come. But once everybody knows that 


232 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


one is going, not for a few days or weeks, but for 
the rest of time, one becomes a community confidant. 
All the festering complexes in which the psycholo- 
gist loves to probe, have an outlet—a perfectly safe 
outlet; for without the flimsy guarantee of a promise 
it is known that these confidences will go no farther 
and will never come back. 

I had noticed this once or twice before, when I had 
left camps, but never had I had so many cards placed 
on the table before me at one time. A few—the men 
whom I spoke of as obviously fitting into the life at 
Monte—stood out as having no more on their con- 
science than to buy a round of drinks before I 
left; but the others, in their conversation the week 
before I said a final good-by, touched depths of dis- 
content that amazed me. 

And seandal! I learned that one of the most ven- 
erable of the officials had come to camp three months 
before his wife and had proposed to four ladies be- 
fore the sad fact of his attachment became known; 
that two families had n’t been speaking for a month 
because one had been asked to a certain dinner, and 
not the other; that ninety percent of the men in 
camp considered themselves underpaid, and every 
other man ridiculously over-valued. 

But these tales were merely the pleasantries with 
which the members of any society amuse one an- 


DOWN THE HILL 233 


other, and with which they salt their somewhat taste- 
less conversation, and what amused me most was the 
universal attitude toward my own poor little home 
town, New York. No one seemed to be able to un- 
derstand why I was going there. What in the world 
could New York afford that Monte lacked? Besides, 
it was such a step backward to go Hast: was not the 
center of civilization already west of the Missis- 
sippi? No one paid any more attention to what New 
York said or did, and I should soon be disgusted 
with its sordidness, and long for the wide open 
spaces. 

But, by the way, since I was going there (here I 
was taken to one side), would it be a great deal of 
trouble to find out what kind of favors were being 
given at the parties there? And just drop a line and 
tell where the trinkets most in vogue could be sent 
for—cheap things, you know, that could be had for 
two or three dollars, so as to show Mrs. Jones (who 
gave the dullest parties, anyhow) just what really 
smart people were doing. Oh, and if you do have to 
go, let us know if they are really playing Mah Jong 
there, or if the papers have just sold it to us on 
advertising; and do they play bridge for money, and 
do the girls actually smoke, and drink gin out of a 
bottle, sitting on a table in a cabaret, with their 
skirts over their knees? The writing of this reminds 


234 IN AND UNDER MEXICO 


me that I really must take a night off and look up 
these things, because I am afraid I have overlooked 
the places my friends knew so much about. 

When at last the day came for me to go, the sin- 
eerity of a few more than made up for the others, 
and it is of these, who know the city and the wilder- 
ness and who have chosen the latter, that I like to 
think. They are the people who own the West, and 
not the malcontents who scorn what they have never 
seen but for no very evident reason seem always to 
desire. As one of the oldest of the foremen said: 

‘‘T don’t belong back there, and I do here, but I 
wish to God you ’d take some of these amateur pio- 
neers back with you, so they could tell New York 
how much they like Mexico; they would, you know. 
I think they ’d be so convincing that a right nice lot 
of people would up and come out!’’ 

And with this last confidence I took my bags in my 
hands and boarded the cage, giving the order to the 
level of the tunnel, for the last time. At the bottom, 
I climbed upon the end of an ore-train and went fly- 
ing out from under the mountain. When we came 
to the tunnel entrance and I set out on the motor 
bound for Cobre, the sun had just set, and as we 
swept down the curving scenic railway the little 
lights of Monte, high up in the sky above me, 
twinkled a last farewell. In the clear, soft air of 
evening, all memories of the petty strife of human 


DOWN THE HILL 235 


beings, plodding away according to their destinies, 
seemed to be dispelled, and only the spirit of great 
men doing great things remained. The thought of 
the mountain, hollowed out and made into metal that 
linked men together over miles of desert, that 
sheathed the bottoms of ships that sailed the seven 
seas, that covered the roofs of palaces and factories, 
filled me with the inspiration of it all, and left me 
with the conviction that however a man may speak 
of his neighbor, or however he may spend his money, 
if he has put his shoulder to the wheel, he has lived 
and been aman. And the men at Monte, Americans 
and Mexicans alike, had put their shoulders to a 
mighty wheel and turned it well. 

The spinning wheels of my motor screeched on the 
winding steel of the track and the lights of the 
colony, twinkling above, swayed in the sky and 
nodded ascent. Then with the next curve, the whole 
mountain stepped silently behind the lesser hill we 
circled, and I saw Monte no more! 


























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